Alexis is best known for his Quincunx Cycle, a series of five novels set in and around Southern Ontario. His second book in that cycle, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Giller Prize and brought both Alexis and his work to greater prominence. He has been compared to contemporary American novelist Percival Everett, with one scholar describing Alexis provisionally as "the Canadian Percival Everett."[2]
Career
Alexis began his artistic career in the theatre, and has held the position of playwright-in-residence at the Canadian Stage Company. His short play Lambton, Kent, and Other Vistas, first produced and performed in 1995, was published as Lambton, Kent in 1999.[1]
In 2010, Alexis published Beauty and Sadness, a prose work that one baffled (but still positive) reviewer described as a "collection of non-fiction" featuring "fictional explorations of writers Alexis admires" transposed into small-town Ontario, and concluded that the book as a whole simply "defies categorization."[6] In his introduction, Alexis says that Beauty and Sadness "is a work of geography as much as it is one of 'criticism'"— provided that "you accept that there are countries named Cocteau, Kawabata, Maupassant, and so on." (Beauty and Sadness xvii) He also warns that the "André Alexis" in this book "is not quite me." (ibid. xviii)
The following year, Alexis returned to the theatre, with a new play for Toronto's Tarragon Theatre: Name in Vain (Decalogue Two), to be directed by Richard Rose (then Artistic Director of Tarragon). The play had its premiere on 4 October 2011, and was described as the first in a planned series of ten works by Alexis, each treating one of the Ten Commandments from Exodus Chapter 20 with a different theatrical or conceptual approach. (Cf.Dekalog.) The title refers to what is given as the Second Commandment by St. Augustine and generally in Catholicism (but third in the Talmud, in the Septuagint, and according to Philo): "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." (KJV) Alexis' "nearly wordless" play is set in a monastery with a rule of monastic silence; one monk, in a moment of rage, breaks not only his vow of silence but that commandment as well, throwing the community of brethren into upheaval.[7]
In 2013, Alexis published a novella titled A, about a fictional Toronto literary critic named Alexander Baddeley who is obsessed with the work of an elusive poet named Avery Andrews.
Alexis has also written several texts for Canadian composerJames Rolfe. Their first collaboration was Rolfe's Fire (1999), a theatrical piece for four voices (two sopranos and two altos) commissioned by the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company.[1][8] Alexis went on to write the libretti for Rolfe's Orpheus and Eurydice (2004) and his chamber operaAeneas and Dido, which premiered at Toronto Masque Theatre in 2007.[9]
In 2014 Rolfe and Alexis collaborated again, in a commission for the Canadian Art Song Project. Alexis wrote "a new cycle of six poems that trace the journey of the sleeper from darkness to light" from which Rolfe composed a song cycle, Moths, premiered by Canadian baritoneBrett Polegato and pianist Steven Philcox.[10][11]
Also in 2014 Alexis published Pastoral, the first in a planned series of five books on philosophical themes called the Quincunx Cycle.[12] Alexis has said that he had planned the cycle and completed Pastoral as early as 2009, but was unable to find a publisher until he came to Coach House Books in Toronto.[13]
quid illo quincunce speciosius, qui, in quamcumque partem spectaveris, rectus est? What more splendid prospect than [trees planted in] the quincunx?— which, however you might look, offers straight lines to the eye.
The next book in his cycle, Days by Moonlight (Quincunx 5) was published in 2019, winning Alexis his second Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.[20] The book was also longlisted for the 2019 Giller Prize.[21] While promoting the book, Alexis suggested that after the final part of the cycle had been published, he would revise the entire cycle.[22]
While completing the cycle, Alexis also wrote Metamorphosis: a Viral Trilogy, a three-part audio drama inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, which was released in conjunction with TO Live, SummerWorks and Canadian Stage.[23] In October 2020, his career-spanning collection of short stories, The Night Piece, was published by Penguin Random House Canada.[24]
Alexis published the fifth and final instalment Ring (Quincunx 3) in 2021.[25]
In 2022, Alexis published his first post-Quincunx work, Winter, or A Town Near Palgrave, about the mysterious hibernation practices of a group of secretive people in a small town called "N___ " near Palgrave, Ontario. However, in an interview later that same year, Alexis confirmed that the Quincunx cycle was as yet unfinished, and that he would rewrite and re-release it as a single volume:
It’s not over because I’m going to rewrite all five novels. It’s not a major rewrite, but I’m going to make sure that there are no editorial flaws. Some incidents happen at the wrong time that need to be made internally consistent. The important thing for me about the Quincunx is not that there is a narrative unity; you don’t start out at one end and go to the other just to discover some narrative truth. It’s a matter of patternings; psychological patterns, geometric ones – each novel is five chapters, the denouement comes in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 is a settling of accounts.
It’s like being in a garden; right now, you can see all the plots, but I’ll just get rid of a few of the weeds. It will come out again as a single volume edition called A Quincunx with Coach House Books. The novels will be in the order they were released, but if you enter them at various points, people can see different things. I love the idea that my order is only one of many.[26]
Alexis continues to live and work in Toronto, where he has hosted programming for CBC Radio, reviews books for The Globe and Mail, and is a contributing editor for This Magazine. He is an adjunct professor in the MA in English and Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto,[27] and was formerly Writer in Residence at the University of Ottawa,[28] and a Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor in Canadian Studies[29] at University College in the University of Toronto.[30]
^Maus, Derek C. "'[O]ne is lost to understand what this has to do with the [Black] experience': Percival Everett, André Alexis, and Racialized Authorial Expectations". Orbit, A Journal of American Literature. Spec ed. Percival Everett. 11 (1 (November 2023)): 1–20. p. 2: ...I'll begin by petitioning the Everett aficionados out there to learn more about a writer I was tempted to designate as "the Canadian Percival Everett"... Hopefully the copious other parallels between these two authors, their works, and their critical reception that I will expand on below are a compelling enticement to consider Alexis's work alongside Everett's.
^"2006 Governor General's Literary Awards". Toronto Star, November 18, 2006.
^"A wonderfully corrupt capital; Andre Alexis novel paints a Mulroney-era portrait of a crazily complex, decadent and exciting Ottawa". Ottawa Citizen, April 27, 2008.
^"New opera explores flip side of classic tale; James Rolfe, Andre Alexis pen a new work where Aeneas gets the last word". Toronto Star, April 25, 2007.
