Review: The Knockoff Eclipse by Melissa Bull // Jason Freure

I remembered everything about “The Knockoff Eclipse,” except for the name and who had written it. I first heard it seven, eight, maybe even nine years ago at a reading in Montreal. It was about a one-night stand in a dystopian Montreal. The guy was just some guy. He used to be in a band. The woman had a shaved head and wore a fibre optic dress that flashed hearts and text that did the flirting for her. A lot of people in the bar wore fibre optic clothes. It was how they stayed warm and lit up rooms. You could buy battery packs at the bar. St-Laurent was under a blackout and there was no heating in the woman’s apartment. I remembered the preamble: the whole story was inspired by apocalyptic dinner conversations about what Quebec would be like after separation. It would be dysfunctional. They would sell all their hydroelectricity to the States and leave their own streets without power. I tried finding it after I read William Weintraub’s The Underdogs. I read that there were hundreds of dystopian Montreal novels—mostly set in a post-separatist Quebec. I gave up looking, worried it had been the work of someone who had wrapped up their Creative Writing B.A. and wisely decided to never publish again, or that it was buried in the back issues of a print-only undergraduate magazine never to be resurrected. Luckily, it was no such thing. It was the eponymous short story in Melissa Bull’s 2018 collection.The Knockoff Eclipse glances into the lives of various Montrealers. They work in coffee shops and department stores or have real jobs in Mississauga after a youth that embarrasses them, or they survive on payments for offering themselves up as test subjects in medical studies. They are dating the wrong person or in a roommate situation with the wrong person or stuck with the wrong person, whether that’s a sibling or a stepmother or everyone at an office at a job they hate. We meet them in diners, bars, offices, and especially inside their apartments. If reading a novel sometimes feels like moving in with the characters, The Knockoff Eclipse is more like couch surfing.There were times in this book—after a series of psychological studies ,or brief moments in lives —where I wished there was something I could grab onto that would carry me through the rest of the stories; some kind of momentum. But that was just personal taste. I knew that wasn’t the point. The point was about life. As the epigraph from Miranda July reads, “All I ever want to know is how people are making it through life. Where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.” That seems like a better evaluation of what Bull’s stories are than I could come up with.There are also some standouts, pieces where the characters, sets, or concepts grab your imagination and draw you in; stories like “The Knockoff Eclipse” or “Cast,” about a Cinderella-esque girl stuck at the cottage with her stepmom, finding refuge from an endless series of chores and poisonous interactions in her Walkman and a single issue of Seventeen.Last of all, there were the stories that ooze with Montreal, variations of which I could consume almost endlessly. There are the stories “Ice storm” and “Parc Lafontaine.” There’s “Chez Serge,” the name of a particularly notorious Mile End bar, but which really winds up in Serge’s apartment and a diner down the street where Louise sticks out; “un spécimen du Canada anglais. Yours To Discover.”The last piece, “Stations of the Cross,” is about coming back to Montreal after growing up. One of the most common insults I’ve heard about Montreal is that it’s a city that needs to grow up. Montreal stays out late and wakes up at noon, Montreal plays in a band, Montreal needs to get a real job (never mind the last few years, where the city has seen better high-skill job growth than any other Canadian or U.S. city—old stereotypes are hard to shake off). When it’s time to grow up, it’s time to move to Toronto. In “Stations of the Cross,” Emmanuelle spends her 20s in Montreal, bumping from jobbine to jobbine in dish pits, flower shops, kitchens, classrooms, and more. By the time she’s 30, she finds a communications job in Mississauga, buys a condo, and 12 years later, she gets sent back for a four-day creative content summit. Walking brings back years of memories: drunk fights outside of downtown bars, failed relationships, making out in public parks in Outremont; an emotional state out of her own control. She relives the years she spent not knowing who she was or what she wanted:

She remembered the hunger in those years. Like some baby vampire waking famished, gluttonous, choosing carelessly and exuberantly, sampling all kinds of people indiscriminately, never guessing there were consequences …Now she was awake and the scenes from her memories haunted her. They layered over what she viewed as she walked, doubling, filtering what she saw.

It’s hard to say when we really grow up. When you’re 20 years old, you feel more like an adult than you ever have. High school feels like a bad dream where you weren’t in control. At what point in your life can you look back ten years and feel like yes, you were an adult that long ago, you made the right choices, they were the responsible choices and you even actually wanted things that way? Maybe it’s only when the suburbs subsume your everyday life, when life encloses around itself and your emotional drama plays out in living rooms and backyards and basement dens instead of city streets, that can startle you without warning with a memory of that boy you never should have dated. Bull has already worked with some of these thematic materials in her poetry collection Rue, but in The Knockoff Eclipse she has a chance to explore new relationships and new characters, and dive into many more strange lives.