Adolescence in Quebec

THE TOWN BELOW (302 pp.)—Roger Lemelin, translated by Samuel Putnam—Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

In Quebec's picturesque Lower Town lies the district of St. Sauveur, a ragged slum in which French Canadians cling to "a mode of life tenaciously wedded to the past and resistant to all progress, obstinately refusing any kind of change for the reason that all change was brought about by outsiders." Unlike the rest of Quebec City's picture-postcard prettiness, St. Sauveur is a wretched place: its proletarian "mulots" are ignorant and desperately poor, its bourgeois "soyeux" (silken ones) often bigoted and pretentious.

Roger Lemelin, himself the son of...