ROBERT PERREAULT, Courtship in Purgatory, Portsmouth, NH: Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2025. ISBN: 1963714075

Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Aubé

It’s 1949 and, though Victoria Paul shares her parents’ goal of finding her a good husband, she doesn’t warm to the suitors they choose for her. Notably, she walks out of a date with a drunken older man, fixed up with her because he’s a respected doctor. The daughter and her parents also share the goal of preserving the French language, spoken by a large—though dwindling—segment of the population in their fictional town of Sagamore Falls, New Hampshire. But the parents, Louis and Régina, have difficulty accepting any man who doesn’t speak grammar-book French, no matter his moral bona fides. So it’s not surprising when Louis does all in his power to put the kibosh on Victoria’s budding relationship with Lucien Xavier who speaks French, but with a decidedly English twist.

Victoria’s father is president of the Le Cercle Champlain, a French-Canadian cultural institution whose mission is the survival of the French-Canadian language and associated values. He and his wife Régina have inculcated a deep love and respect for their culture and language in their three children, Victoria and her two brothers. The East End of Sagamore Falls, where they live in a large, comfortable house, is the neighborhood of the social and economic elite, both English- and French-speaking. A larger portion of the Francophone population make their homes in the less well-off Frenchville part of town, including Lucien. But the Frenchville folks aren’t members of the Cercle Champlain;the cultural programming doesn’t align with their interests  and the membership fees are beyond their means. Author Perreault effectively shows that a common language is not necessarily sufficient to hold a people together.

Discouraged by her parents’ matchmaking attempts and feeling the imperative of age—she is thirty-three—Victoria takes things into her own hands. She spots Lucien coming out of Plourde’s grocery store, then talks to him after Sunday Mass. From the beginning, Lucien strikes Victoria as kind and down-to-earth, the opposite of the stuffed shirts her parents have lined up for her. As she gets to know Lucien, she admires the generosity he displays despite his relatively limited means: he supports the fatherless household of his mother and siblings by working at a printing shop. Victoria nonetheless feels the pinch of their differences when his parsimoniousness surfaces on their dates. Frugality is foreign to her, given her upbringing, yet she manages to accept it in Lucien because she understands where he’s coming from.

From the start of the courtship, Victoria needs help to make a go of it, given the upper-class lens through which her parents view life. Her new friend Rose is the support she leans on. Like Lucien, Rose comes from working-class Frenchville. She has recently started working at the Cercle Champlain, and met Victoria there. This friendship highlights the trajectory that transports Victoria away from the path her parents would wish for her. Rose encourages Victoria in her initial efforts to meet Lucien, and she subsequently fosters the relationship by delivering messages between the couple and offering a sounding board to Victoria when her father ramps up the pressure on her to split from Lucien. Rose also fills a gap in Victoria’s sheltered upbringing by introducing her to salty language, to the amusement of the pupil. In her pursuit of Lucien and friendship with Rose, Victoria minimizes the importance of their socio-economic differences, and also smooths over the linguistic ones, accepting these characters’ embrace of French and excusing the incursion of English.

The church locale where Victoria often sees Lucien would seem to augur well for an eventual encounter between him and her parents, who are fervent Catholics. But from their first meeting it’s evident that the parents’ acceptance of Lucien is far from a foregone conclusion. His franglais doesn’t meet their sky-high grammar and vocabulary standards, and their lifestyle differences are painfully evident. Lucien puts on a brave face during the first excruciating visit, but soon, Louis begins putting his considerable social clout behind a campaign to discredit Lucien, and he succeeds in separating the couple. 

Author Robert Perreault makes the story feel long ago, with his use of cultural markers such as clothes and cars and the attitudes of the characters. He shows a particular interest in cars, mentioning myriad details of the different models. Identifying with Victoria, I truly felt the straight-jacket of social expectations encasing her because of her social standing. Her parents’ criteria for a good husband rest primarily on his position on the social and economic chessboard. Victoria’s independent streak, which motivates her to find her own husband, is modern, perhaps a bit more so than is completely believable for the time period. But there is no denying that Victoria is living a reality different from that of her parents, and Perreault is spot-on for situating the novel at this time, given its main theme of cultural and linguistic change. The post-war period was a time of social change for all of America; the social mixing among soldiers spilled over into the communities they returned home to, making ethnic neighborhoods more porous socially and economically, and weakening the hold of French language and culture. This new mixed environment is embodied in the name of Lucien’s brother, Guillaume, known by the family as Ti-Willy, which combines an anglicized name, Willy, with an old French prefix indicating a diminutive (Ti-). In pursuing Lucien, Victoria demonstrates her openness to the changing times. 

Perreault weaves a complex web of contrasts and competing forces, which keep the courtship careening from one crisis to another: father against mother, parents against daughter, father against Lucien, secrets kept from the mother, French-speaking versus English-speaking, elite versus working folk, East End versus Frenchville. These dynamics move the action through a series of compelling scenes, including one moment of revelation in particular that literally took my breath away. (But don’t expect a spoiler from me!)

In the Catholic spiritual cosmos, purgatory is the waystation where souls expiate minor sins in the hope of entering heaven. Victoria and Lucien suffer the purgatory of her father rolling boulders onto the path of their courtship. The Catholic view is that all souls in purgatory eventually go to heaven, but the timeframe in which this happens is timeless eternity. Will Victoria and Lucien reach matrimonial paradise in an earthly timeframe?

The novel deploys the structure of a story within a story. In the frame story, Victoria sets out in 1976 to help her now-grown son, Paul, to decipher the French of her deceased father’s journals, which span the years 1936 to 1966, from his rise to the presidency of Le Cercle Champlain to his death. In doing so, she discovers a secret her father had hidden from her, and this prompts her review of her own life, which constitutes the novel’s main story. The frame story serves to highlight the primary theme of the book: the precarious post-war situation of the French language and French-Canadian Catholic culture in America. And therein lies a major irony of the story: the grandson of the late great protector of French has limited proficiency in the language of his ancestors.

I enjoyed discovering the vivid slice of Franco-American reality that comes to life in this well-told tale. I would like to read a sequel that focuses on the son Paul and his feelings toward French. This relationship, I suspect, may be the hard nut that Robert Perreault is really trying to crack in this story.