Variations on a Dream by Angélique Lalonde
Of Myth, Porn, and Emancipation
In Angélique Lalonde’s Variations on a Dream, Sarah is a people-pleasing mommy blogger marked by the mysterious death of her often abusive father when she was young. She’s married to Trevor, a sex-addicted author and professor she met when they were both in university. He carries his own damage from childhood, specifically to his perception of women after discovering his dad’s stash of messed-up pornography. They started dating after his failed pursuit of her gorgeous, brilliant, and boundlessly creative roommate Ariadne, a woman she loved as well. When the novel begins, Sarah and Trevor are newly middle-aged parents about to be triggered into a spectacular transformation inspired by a porn video featuring someone who looks eerily like Ariadne did all those years before—someone who turns out to be a student in one of Trevor’s classes.
“ Lalonde’s first novel is scrappy and ambitious, flickering with gorgeous sentences by turns abstract and grounded, wry and disturbing.”
Arriving five years after her Giller-longlisted debut story collection, Lalonde’s first novel is scrappy and ambitious, flickering with gorgeous sentences by turns abstract and grounded, wry and disturbing. They ignite a constellation of symbols, from yellow chickadees to black swans, red cars to red dresses, and blue marbles to grey hex keys, not to mention the myth of the labyrinth from which Ariadne gets her name. It’s a heartfelt and intellectual book that stumbles over excesses in characterization and a lapse in structure, but it’ll make fans of readers who want a modern relationship novel that doesn’t shy away from graphic sex without (ultimately) debasing its characters and, by extension, readers themselves.
Its flaws are intertwined. Although neatly packaged in the first paragraph of jacket copy, the setup actually spans almost half the book, starting in the present before taking us back to each character’s childhood and university days, and while these chapters are some of the strongest, they give over to a long and largely expository account of Sarah and Trevor’s marriage, during which the author repeatedly underscores the latter’s vile characteristics: he’s emotionally manipulative and endlessly self-prioritizing; he’s frail and furtive; he’s sexually frustrated and extremely crass when he gets it; and he loves Charles Bukowski, a tedious creep by any measure.
Despite a touch too many exclamation marks, the writing is indisputably rich, and Lalonde frequently uses unmoored dialogue to help carry the long tract of exposition, but with so few fully rendered scenes, we don’t get many narrative crystallizations of Trevor’s traits. If we did, there probably wouldn’t be a need to reframe them so often, and not only could the setup be confined to the more traditional third of the page count, the brevity would make Trevor less satirically archetypal (or at least less gratingly), which might better serve the book’s politics. How many women wind up this ensnared by men so transparently awful? A fair few, no doubt, but don’t the greater threats come from the more insidious predators?
Although the mid-story and climax are stalled by the extended beginning, they still bring a lot of movement when they come, much of it making crafty use of the multiple points of view previewed in the opening pages. All the symbols, themes, and arcs are braided with the unique approach to language, offering a memorable payoff that will likely hit a resonating, emotional, and emancipatory note for most readers. While not without baggage, Variations on a Dream is a hugely ambitious first novel, and even if we have to wait another half decade for Lalonde’s next book, no doubt we’ll be rewarded with something better still.
About the Author
ANGÉLIQUE LALONDE’s work has been featured in PRISM International, The Journey Prize Stories, Room, and The Malahat Review, among other publications. She received the 2019 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She lives on Gitxsan Territory in Northern B.C. Her short story collection Glorious Frazzled Beings was shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
About the Reviewer
Paul Carlucci is the author of one novel, The Voyageur, and three story collections, The High-Rise in Fort Fierce, A Plea for Constant Motion, and The Secret Life of Fission. He won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and has been a finalist for two Ottawa Book Awards and two ReLit Awards. He’s a freelance editor, working with academics and research professionals, hybrid and traditional presses, and aspiring authors.
Book Details
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
Publication date : Feb. 3 2026
Language : English
Print length : 464 pages
ISBN-10 : 0771012608
ISBN-13 : 978-0771012600