It helps to know a bit about film when cracking the covers of Retcon—or a lot. Repeat Governor General’s Award nominee Morse’s newest novel—a companion book to 2023’s Tulpa Mea Culpa—is just as obsessed with academic politics, metafiction, and genre-hopping at the speed of sound, but it’s built almost purely out of film references: Godard, Wong Kar-Wai, tracking shots and fancasting, and a paranoid sequence linked mostly by films Gene Hackman was in if you assume all those characters are the same guy.
What results: a slightly raunchy Fellini-esque situation comedy spun through the lens of film culture absurdity—and enough seriousness to satisfy.
Retcon lands us in the trope-obsessed head of Tom Mellersch: a fortyish amateur actor, film critic, and theorist (if you believe his infinite supply of tall tales), or an uninspired office worker and art scene parasite if you don’t. When Tom comes back to his hometown for a film studies conference, it’s straight into the arms of a film-noir plot to dethrone their former mentor, Cinny, from his university department. Cinny has married Tom’s ex-girlfriend Esme, the woman Tom’s been trying to remake with a host of later girlfriends, and Esme and Tom instantly strike up a toxic flirtation right as Tom’s writing his own theoretical magnum opus: a direct challenge to Cinny’s scholarship. After a little talk about The Talented Mr. Ripley, there’s nothing subtle about how ready Tom is to metaphorically kill his old professor and sleep with his wife.
The academics jostling around Cinny find both situations politically useful. Over one weekend, a larger-than-life ensemble cast of Hollywood day players, melodramatic amateur opera companies, suckup grad students, and department heads collide in a slapstick coup attempt worthy of Bugs Bunny, or Lear.
The trouble is, potentially none of this is quite true. Tom has a predilection for fantasy. And when everyone’s a theorist and everything feels like the movies, it’s worth asking what’s actually happening between Tom’s old friends at a one-weekend film studies conference and what a narrator who’s a touch dramatic has just edited in post. But what results is a stylistically wild, elaborate, and deeply funny card trick of a novel.
Retcon‘s a prose film: definitely an art film, and in terms of sheer melodrama per square inch probably an opera, alternating fragmented, surrealist arias and grounded, plot-advancing recitatives that flow like a deep breath. Tom’s narration—a wisecracking, faintly neo-noir narrative voice that never uses one word when ten will do—and set-piece fantasies are interspersed with long sections of Tom’s own writing. A screenplay treatment, a pet critical theory serve as keys to what Tom might actually just be overinterpreting and how readers can interpret him.
“The more elaborate idea of cinematic polysemia, where a series of errant images have a secret logic of their own, on a path that makes up a different film from the one we are watching,” Tom says, as he pontificates on the remake of Godard’s Breathless, “or possibly a number of other films.” And that’s not just him talking: it’s a clue. Morse leaves plenty of directions for how to interpret Retcon‘s little referential puzzles, and as solving them gets easier and easier, the satisfaction grows. It’s the closest demonstration I’ve ever seen of why critical reading is fun.
And the best thing about this intricate, intellectual, film-literate book might in fact be its tongue-in-cheek sense of fun. It’s bursting with personality, referential, self-aware and revels in silliness. Morse peppers his prose with fun little jokes—naming its four sections after movie night, from the groaner pun of “Attractions” to titling Tom’s pandemic years “Intermission”—to a sort of Mae Westian amusement at the politics of writers, actors, and film people. Our glimpses of the conference weekend are a scathing satire of academia, and before the consequences start piling up in increasingly foreboding ways, Retcon fully commits to skewering everything within reach.
Morse has a detailed eye for satire, and his pointed observations about the pettiness of arts scenes sting less because Tom is a critic by nature, but also visibly an asshole. His own dubious, shaky ways of constructing something like a self, take the edge off how much he satirizes others: people brimming with insecurity and condescension and a truly mind-boggling amount of seductions, attempted seductions, or sleeping around.
Or maybe that’s just Tom projecting onto things. Because quietly keeping pace with Tom’s Fellini-esque anecdotes of all the women he’s slept with or wanted to is the visible fact that he’s absolutely That Guy: the one who only shows up to any semi-professional arts space to pick up; who never manages to publish or act in or develop much before he’s chasing the latest pretty girl. He’s only part of this scene in theory—and that’s the most biting thing running through Retcon. Every one of its players has their little theories, and nobody’s theories are quite a match for the situation at hand.
That’s the second virtue of Retcon: How serious it is, under those jokes, about treating lives as performance and the limits of theorizing the world. Faced with people who only feel their feelings through intermediary media, who can’t see themselves except through cinematography or carry a tiny director in their heads, any direct insight hits hard. “We just want something to happen to us,” Tom tells Esme, thinking of it as a betrayal instead of, perhaps, what’s caused all this trouble to start with.
Retcon isn’t a skimmable book. It asks you to show up to every sentence but rewards you thoroughly for showing up. Smart, buoyant, and gleefully stuffed with personality, it’s a book happy to let readers inside the theatre, making few concessions on what it wants to be, unhesitatingly confident that the work of understanding it is half the fun. It’s a rare treat for people willing to really tangle with their art.
Retcon
by Garry Thomas Morse
At Bay Press, June 2025, 400 p.p., $24.95
ISBN: 9781998779000
Leah Bobet’s novels have won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder, and Prix Aurora Awards; her short fiction is anthologized worldwide. Her poetry has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, and Canthius, and has placed in the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize and the Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry. She was the Utopia Award-winning poetry editor for Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice’s 2021 issue and the longtime editor of Ideomancer Speculative Fiction. She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds grassroots food security networks, and plants both tomatoes and trees. Visit her at www.leahbobet.com.