After more than a decade [Marie-Claire Blais] has at last recaptured in Le Sourd dans la ville the ring of profound human truth so intensely present in Une Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, to which this novel will surely be often compared. The run-on syntax with which she flirted somewhat awkwardly in Les Nuits de l'Underground is mastered here, with stunning results. In one long paragraph containing no more than perhaps three dozen full stops, Blais brings to life—and then to death—the inhabitants of the gloomy little Montreal hotel that serves as the novel's setting. Like voices in a fugue or threads in a well-made tapestry, their lives weave in and out through each other to form a harmonious (though depressing) whole.

The bond linking all these individuals is pain—physical, psychological, spiritual. There is Florence Gray, a jilted wife contemplating suicide, trying to achieve the detachment necessary to commit the final, irrevocable act that will terminate her shattered existence. At nearly the last moment, however, she finds she cannot remain indifferent to the suffering of little Mike, soon to die of the cancer eating away inside his skull. Mike's mother Gloria, who supports the family by running the hotel and working nights in a burlesque house, tries to comfort her son and give him hope, and she even takes a sort of maternal interest in Florence, her reticent, mysterious tenant. Gloria too, however, has her own cross to bear in the form of a penchant for linking her life with a series of brutish criminals who satisfy her deep craving for sex but fail to share her great capacity for real affection. (pp. 616-17)

Le Sourd dans la ville is by no means just a cleverly written soap opera. If Gloria verges a little too closely on the stock character of the "tough gal with the heart of gold," the portrait of absolute depair incarnated by Florence Gray is chillingly convincing. Mike, Florence's fellow sufferer on the physical plane, is the most deeply moving creature invented by Blais since the unforgettable Jean le Maigre. Like him, Mike raises by his very existence the great unresolved moral question of pain and suffering inflicted upon the innocent, of mindless evil for which the human race can find neither a satisfactory explanation nor an effective remedy. The tension that permeates the novel arises from the fact that all these doomed individuals are caught up together in a seamless web of pain—as seamless as the form used to describe it—yet each must bear his own in total isolation, removed by its very intensity from the possibility of having it assuaged by others.

That paradox is perhaps the key to the magic of this novel, which borrows so many superficial details from the author's earlier works but clearly surpasses all but one of them. In Le Sourd dans la ville Marie-Claire Blais rises above the level of social critic, dabbler in morbid psychology, and gifted artist, to become what every great writer down through the ages has been: a genuine moraliste. As we read this novel we recognize as our own the universal contradictions and dilemmas facing characters whose specific problems we do not necessarily share. If Blais can sustain in future works the combination of human authenticity and tight technical mastery that she found in Une Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel and has achieved again in Le Sourd dans la ville, she may well come to stand out as one of the most powerful fiction writers of French expression of this generation. (p. 617)