Bibliographic record
Abstract
D.Y. Bechard. Vandal Love. Scarborough, ON: Doubleday Canada, 2006. 345 pp. $29.95 hc. D.Y. Bechard's first novel, which won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, is difficult to classify as it combines the mythological, historical, social, and spiritual. At times reminiscent of Kerouac's On the Road, Vandal Love takes us all over North America. We can feel the influence of Bechard's Franco-American background in his depiction of characters who are torn between French and English. The novel starts with family from Quebec, the Herves--a family divided between giants and runts. We follow the descendants of these misfits as they flock to the United States or Western Canada in hopes of better life. Do they find it? Not quite. Gigantic Jude's famous boxing career is cut short by hand injury that will leave him destitute and miserable. His equally gigantic daughter, Isa, enters strange platonic marriage with much older man. She dies in car crash. Diminutive Francois's self-made man approach brings him financial success but no lasting relationship. His tiny son, Harvey, will experiment with different religions without ever finding what he is really looking for. Bechard divides his novel into two parts. While book 1 follows the giant's line from 1946 to 1994, book 2 focuses on the smaller branch of the family from 1918 to 2006. It is hard to sum up or give an overview of Vandal Love because the novel deals with too many issues over too long period of time: the hard life of Quebecois labourers at the beginning of the twentieth century, interracial relationships in the United States in the 1960s, the effects of the Revolution tranquille on Quebec society in the 1970s, the particular pattern of fathers raising daughters on their own and fathers abandoning their sons, the new age cult and religious experimentation of our recent fin de siecle, and so on. While the encyclopaedic quality of this ambitious novel is undeniable, it also suffers at times from discrepancies. The story is at its best when the author describes contemporary events that would have been familiar to him (Bechard was born in 1974), but it falters slightly when it touches upon situations that happened before the 1980s. When exposing the hardships faced by the Herve family in the early 1900s, Bechard's tone echoes the exaggerations often found in legends. For instance, the father of the entire Herve line is described at some point as a large angry man staring with his one eye(25) and his daughter, intent on not giving birth, pummelled her belly, threw herself down hills and stairs, plunged into icy water and hurtled against low branches . …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.377 | 0.243 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".