André Alexis's playful new novel is set in a Mulroney-era Ottawa of pork-barreling and sexual intrigues. (Julie Enfield/McClelland & Stewart)

Asylum, the long-awaited new novel by André Alexis, is a Russian doll of a book, thick with layers and twists. For starters, there’s its dedication to Harry Mathews, a member of the merry band of mathematical and literary pranksters known as Oulipo. Then there’s Mark Ford, its very unreliable narrator. From the remove of a self-imposed exile at a Tuscan monastery, Ford relates the ups and mostly downs of a loosely connected group of intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa in the 1980s.

As for the plot of this largely interior, contemplative tale: Everything and nothing much at all happens over the course of almost 500 pages. That is, except for a sexual scandal involving a squeaky-clean veteran politician, a pork-barrel plan to build a “civilized” mega-prison out of imported marble and an extramarital affair that has violent consequences. Throw in long passages written in French (sans translation) and name-check Thomas Aquinas and G.W.F. Hegel, and you have Alexis’s peculiar – and compelling – brand of eggheaded playfulness. Even the title is a riddle: Can a madhouse also be a place of sanctuary?

Over drinks at a Toronto restaurant near the CBC, where he produces and hosts the radio show Skylarking, Alexis explains that the novel’s convolutions are the result of form following function. “When you start off with an image, it has a life of its own,” he says. “With this novel, it began with the idea of separation and two-ness, the split between Europe and the New World, between the divine and the day-to-day, between the public self and the private self. All of that actually went into the fabric of the novel.”

The novel, like most of Alexis’s previous work – in particular, his 1998 debut novel Childhood and his 1995 play Lambton, Kent – is also about dislocation, a theme that has a personal resonance for him. In the early 1960s, his family immigrated from multiracial Trinidad to Canada on the brink of Pierre Trudeau’s multicultural revolution, and settled in bilingual Ottawa for much of Alexis’s childhood. Since then, the nation's capital has cast a spell over him, inspiring what he refers to as his “Ottawa trilogy” – Childhood, Asylum and a current work-in-progress.

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Though he rejects the idea that his writing is autobiographical, Alexis acknowledges that his fiction covers personal emotional terrain. “I’m not a diarist, so I do tend to work things out in my novels,” he says. “It took 10 years to write this one. I was in love twice during that period, and both times overwhelmingly so, and over the course of writing the book there were breakups and shakeups in my life. Some of those emotions are in the book.”

Yet, even as his writing returns again and again to the theme of identity, Alexis is equally reluctant to wear the mantle of Black Writer. In a 1998 profile of Alexis in Quill & Quire, literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse called him “a rare bird: a black author who attempts to tackle issues like displacement and unbelonging without placing the major emphasis on racism or race.”

Alexis, whose characters are black, Asian, white and of mixed race, seems uncomfortable with both the idea that he ought to be writing about race and the suggestion that he is not. “I understand that it’s necessary to have black writers talk about what it’s like to be black,” he says. “And I feel that, on some level, I am taking advantage of the freedom that has been gained by those who have spoken of being black. Because the purpose of speaking about being black is to make sure you are accepted in your humanity. It is also important to prove that you can speak of your humanity before you speak of your race.

"That’s the tricky part: You may not be speaking directly about race, but everything you do is informed by race. You look at my work – the outsiderness, the constant search for definition, the resolution of opposites. All of that stuff is very much a product of being an outsider. But I want to come at that in a different way.”

In Asylum, he comes at it through his characters’ quests for a sense of place and belonging. One of them, the child of a black Trinidadian mother and a white British father, muses that “making a home is more difficult than astrophysics.” The conundrum for immigrants and the children of immigrants, Alexis says, is that one’s idea of home is forever shifting. “But in the end, there are places that have emotional meaning to you and that hold memories for you. That’s been the process of the Ottawa novels for me. Ottawa is a repository of memories. A kind of sacred ground.”

That is, perhaps, another of the novel’s sly jokes: that buttoned-up Ottawa is the source of such passion and drama. Even Alexis is aware of how odd that might seem, writing in Asylum that “Ottawa was a contradiction: a city on the surface, a town in essence, as if Cornwall had conquered Montreal.... It was a place that drank itself, politely but determinedly, insensate every Friday.”

In Alexis’s hands, the city is a place with a palpable sense of possibility and change. Every shift in power and each new prime minister reshapes the capital’s personality. Ottawa in the 1980s was a golden period for the now-defunct federal Progressive Conservatives, an era of shoulder pads and power brokering. And it marked the beginning of the economic and political ascent of the Canadian West. The ambitious, polished ideologues who populate the novel are future Stephen Harpers and Stockwell Days. For Alexis, whose politics lean in the opposite direction (he’s been a contributor and board member of the lefty journal This Magazine), capturing this time was a thrilling challenge.

“It’s hard to do politicians right because it’s too easy to be contemptuous. But, in effect, politics is an aspect of creative intelligence. What a politician does is look at reality and wish it to be other, and works on reality the way an artist works on paper. That desire to change reality comes from a deeply creative place, but it rarely gets credit for that because those guys are hard to take seriously. They’re so smiley and fake. But what they’re doing on a civic level and public level is creative. Of course, whether it’s good – because we have to live in their creations, after all – is another question.”

Asylum is published by McClelland & Stewart.

Rachel Giese is a Toronto writer and editor.