Spoilers for the whole damn trilogy to follow, obvs. I mean, it says "WARE SPOILERS" right up there in the blog header but none of you ever read that, apparently. So, to reiterate, WARE SPOILERS FOR VERNON SUBUTEX, in both its book and televisual forms.
The trilogy starts off as quite a naturalistic piece of contemporary fiction, for all that it's written very much in the mold most famously established for most of you as performed by George R.R. Martin's still-incomplete A Song of Ice and Fire; the storytelling comes from an omniscient third person narrator but brings us into the intimate point of view of a different character (and there are almost as many characters in Vernon Subutex as there are in ASOIAF) every "chapter" (though the book isn't divided into chapters per se -- lots of fun for someone writing a longish piece and using the ebook version for reference), starting with our eponymous hero, Vernon Subutex (not his real name -- which, the surname is actually the name of a drug used to treat opiod addiction, so I guess in America we'd call him Vern Methadone? -- but you don't get his real name until the very, very end, and there's no point in spoiling that here), freshly evicted from his Paris apartment not long after he finally had to give up and close his famous record store, Revolver. His couch surfing introduces us to many of the other characters whose lives we are going to share for many hundreds of pages (and this includes the dogs**), but the most pivotal figure after Vernon is one we only meet in flashbacks: his boyhood friend Alex Bleach (not his real name), world famous pop star and stud about town, recently dead of a drug overdose. Bleach was paying Vernon's rent, you see, but that stopped when Bleach's heart did, touching off most of the events of the novel.
Bleach also left behind, on Vernon's old digital camera, a slightly crazed videotaped confessional and a sample of some weird new aural ideas he's been playing with, that now constitutes his "last interview" and serves as a McGuffin for most of the first book, which I am going to refer to as Frenchie for the French bulldog on the cover of the otherwise boringly named Vernon Subutex 1. As soon as word gets out that this "interview" exists, the core clique from his old record store days goes bananas, as, not much later on, do certain members of the Cultural Exploitation Class of 21st Century Paris, namely an extremely powerful film/TV/music producer, Laurent Dopalet (whom I mentally christened Larry Dope immediately, because I am a child), who is pretty sure Bleach's tape will expose a crime or two on Dopalet's conscience that could possibly topple him from his seat atop the cultural and economic heap.
I might be introducing this theme too soon, but the last chapter or so of Schauzer (boringly named Vernon Subutex 3) strongly indicates that we're to have been perceiving this trio as a sort of loose allegory on the good old Gospels, with Bleach our John the Baptist, Vernon our Jesus, and either Larry Dope or a sinister instigator-or-surrogate we don't meet until the third novel, Max, as the Devil. This is, of course, a blasphenomenal way of messing with the Bible as all of these people spend vast amounts of their time in this story either drunk off their asses or blasting their sinuses with grotesque amonts of cocaine, not to mention the company they're all keeping, including porn stars, trans people, homeless people and a trans porn star. Actually, that part is rather Christ-like, never mind. We're not meant, though, to see these figures in this light for our era, anymore than your average tavern regular in Galillee would immediately have perceived gossip about that carpenter and his band of misfits a Holy Story in the making. At best we're supposed to be getting a warts-and-all (so many warts. So many warts, you guys) "real" back story, before Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul (George and Ringo) (remember this is a story about a dealer in vinyl records, so I couldn't help it) et al filtered out all the less than savory bits of the Greatest Story. The final chapters of Schnauzer (aka
Vernon Subutex 3. Snooze) give us a telescoped Olaf Stapledon-esque capsule future history of the world years, then decades, then centuries after the events of the Subuteuch. Vernon is, by the end of this future history, an actual Christ figure, whose cult has survived by imitating Vernon's own course through life after his eviction from his Paris apartment. We'll get to that.
And so you see now, perhaps, why I'm really wondering if Virginie Despentes is a pantser or a plotter. Had she set out to make Vernon a Christ Figure all along, or did that idea come to her somewhere along the way as a great way to add a whole 'nother layer of Fuck You to the establishment in this Punk Prose trilogy? I find that I prefer one answer to the other as I dictate these lines right now, but we'll see where this goes. This isn't a book review; it's an essay. I'm entertaining some ideas about these books, figuring out what I think about them as I write.
I didn't embark on this journey on my own, by the way. I'm a fan of and, I guess now, a participant/occasional guest on, The 2 Month Review Podcast, a show that takes up a different Great Big Book (or, often, a trilogy that can be read as a single Great Big Book, as is Vernon Subutex or CoDex 1962) every two months and, once a week, holds a livestreamed discussion about a pre-arranged section of its text that is later also released as an audio-only podcast. As they frequently focus on works, as in this case, that have been translated from other languages, hosts Chad W. Post and Brian Wood are often joined by professional translators (including the translator of the American edition of Vernon Subutex, the incredible Frank Wynne), booksellers, other writers and the odd literary fangirl like me (here's a link to my episode). It's a great show and the two months spent on Vernon Subutex are among the program's most entertaining (and profane) to date. Anway, along the way we challenged each other often on a lot of important questions, the biggest of which was just how redeemable certain despicable characters (and the two villains mentioned so far aren't necessarily the most despicable of Vernon Subutex' cast), just how much of a punk Virginie Despentes really is, whether the Canal+ television adaptation of Vernon Subutex is worth watching (SPOILER: it is), and above all, the music. This is a story about a vinyl record dealer. Music is a big, big, big deal.
Music, Music, Music
Virgine Despentes masterfully uses music choices to convey information about her characters. This is terrific for people who are of her moment (and she, as I'll discuss later, is a very, very Generation X writer) but I suspect that older or younger readers will have to do a bit of work to catch what's she's trying to say about all of these people she made up. A seriously attentive reader who doesn't know who the hell the Eagles of Death Metal are (to give but one obscure-ish but rather important example) would do well to keep a browser window open to YouTube, or Pandora, or whatever service they use to check out new tunes, while reading. I found this aspect of the book particularly enjoyable (except when I found out that villain Larry Dope shares my love for Jordi Savall and his wonderful soundtrack for the film Tous les Matins du Monde), though I, too, had to check out a lot of new-to-me song selections because I spent the 90s (when these characters were all in their prime) writing for a local scene music magazine in Boston and if it wasn't a Boston or Boston-adjacent band, or at least the kind of nearly-unknown indie musicians who sent us their stuff gratis in the hopes of a review, I didn't hear it unless it was playing in the aisles of Restoration Hardware or the bodega where I got my milk and eggs. Now at last my excuse to get to know Osees (known in Vernon Subutex by their old moniker The Oh Sees), for example, was at hand!
By the way, if you're a freak like me who likes to listen to music and read simultaneously (I do it for particular reasons related to my medical issues), or just want to hear a selection of the stuff that gets talked about in the books, the 2 Month Review Boys and I have a playlist going on Spotify. It's not comprehensive in that we haven't included every single song mentioned in the novels, and sometimes we have taken the liberty to add songs that we feel suit the flavor of the music Despentes invokes but she just might not have heard ofm like my personally beloved The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. A lot of the selections are taken directly from DJ Mixmaster ChadPost, who usually just picks a single great song for a "season" (he earned my love forever for choosing the very best Kinks song, "Big Sky" for the seasons about Rodrigo Fresan's Tres Partes novels . The boy has taste, is what I'm saying), but for Vernon Subutex he went wild and chose a different song for every episode! By the way, if you have suggestions for the playlist (SJ, I'm thinking of you), I'm always open, to adding more. This thing is a work in progress! Get in touch with me on Twitter where I'm @katesherrod.
Anyway, Despentes doesn't just use music as a character descriptive shorthand; it's also a plot driver in a very special way, one that is an element of the story that could potentially lead some to classify Vernon Subutex as speculative fiction. Before rock star Alex Bleach died he had started experimenting with binaural beats, an audio phenomenon that, as currently understood, can only occur if a person is wearing headphones. The effect is acheived when two slightly different tones at a certain difference in frequency from one another are played, one to each ear, causing the listener's brain to perceive a third "phantom" tone "in between." Musicians sometimes use them to tune instruments, but more germaine to this story is that a lot of people consider this phenomenon to have therapeutic value for stress relief, improved concentration or motivation, or just deepened meditation, but there's not a lot of hard scientific evidence to support these uses as of this writing.
In the Vernon Subutex universe, however, not only has Alex Bleach discovered a variety of these that can work via the sound system at a rock concert or DJ session, but that also can promote a kind of neural harmony, or at least a truly overwhelming urge to dance together that amounts to neural harmony, amongst a whole crowd of listeners. As the plot of the novels moves from the search for the "lost interview" of Alex Bleach to Vernon's adventures after he and his precious tapes are recovered by his friends and a small group of new acquaintances, Vernon begins a new life we could characterize as "will DJ for food." He's always had a freak talent for assessing a person and figuring out what kind of music that person likes or would like if they could just be exposed to it -- a great ability in a record dealer (I love how, throughout the novels, he is referred to always as a dealer, never as a seller or record store owner; music as drugs is as omnipresent an idea as are drugs themselves), vital in a guy who "pays for" his upkeep by spinning at private parties or, later on, at "Convergences" he and his friends begin to throw in out of the way places once word spreads about the incredible experiences people have at his DJ sets. They think it's just his music choices, his talent for segues, his ability to read the room, but it's also Alex Bleach's sonic mumbo jumbo, mu hah hah hah!
By the way, if those Convergences don't make you think at least a little bit about this scene -- the activity, not so much the dialogue -- in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster (2015), I think you probably haven't seen the film yet. Do something about that!
Warfare
Conflict is what drives most novels, and there are so many kinds of conflict at play in Vernon Subutex you'll want to keep a first aid kit handy while you read. Class war is a big one, as a lot of economic anxiety that is actual economic anxiety (as well as the kind that is disguised racism) can't help but surface when your title character teeters on the edge of homelessness before plunging right in; Vernon's couch-surfing days take him from a typical one-bedroom working class apartment to a well-appointed family home to a posh divorcee's epic pad to an unbelievably fancy converted loft space owned by a coke-hoovering day trader who lets artist types crash for free as long as they amuse him and obey his arbitrary rules. Vernon takes all of this in stride, but other characters with whom we spend time along his journey have definite opinions and resentments about the stunning inequalities on display here, to say nothing of those we can't help but encounter in scenes devoted to top-of-the-heap mogul Larry Dope's world of truly obscene power and privilege -- or the precarious lives of an unbelievably charismatic group of homeless people who briefly take Vernon in before being absorbed into the Subu-Circle. But wait, there's more.
There's also a pretty strong element of generational warefare here. Almost all of our point-of-view characters, including all but one of Vernon Subutex' original and expanded social circle, are Generation X, and French Gen X-ers seem to have most of the same baggage we American ones do; written off as worthless slackers before we were even old enough to work full time, kept at the bottom of every employment hierarchy because the people ahead of us decided "don't trust anyone over 30" needed switched to "don't trust anyone under 30" right around the time we were hitting our 20s and early 30s, convinced by the Regan/Thatcher/Mitterand years that all of this was just fine because there wasn't going to be a future anyway because Nuclear War would end it all, bombarded non-stop by the pop culture juggernauts of our elders and only able to create little pockets of our own culture at the margins of society, trapped in a demographic that was only relevant to the all powerful force of Marketing for like five years in the 90s, etc. A handful of other characters are Zoomers, kids who either grew up at Vernon's record store or are the children of pivotal characters. Amusingly enough, it is this handful of Zoomers who are the only ones who actually do anything about the crimes of the villains But the villains? Oh, the villains. While there are some reprehensible characters among the Xers and Zoomers, the villains, the authors of the greatest evils in the trilogy's many plots, are Boomers: Larry Dope and a douchebag-come-lately who doesn't even show up until the second half of Schnauzer called Max.
Larry was born with a silver coke spoon up his nose but still felt that he had to be ruthless AF to get anywhere in the entertainment industry, even though, as we learn from his few POV chapters, he really doesn't care at all about art or music or cinema. Late in the trilogy we get to spend a chapter with him while he binges The Walking Dead, for shit's sake. And expends what little energy he has to expend on trying to think of a way he can replicate the success of that pap for himself -- this after having driven at least one employee, the lovely and capable Zoomer (I think) Anais, quite round the bend insisting she scour the internet (especially Instagram and What's App, two services Larry Dope does not even begin to understand) for the Next Big New Thing for him to capitalize on. But he also sets her to help one of the two greatest characters I've encountered this year, The Hyena, in tracking down the Alex Bleach tapes, not because he's interested in the potential artistic or technical accomplishments they might represent, but because he's pretty sure Alex spilled the beans on some Very Bad Things Larry Dope did years ago that would Ruin His Reputation and maybe even get him French Cancelled. Said Very Bad Things involving a now-dead Gen X porn star named Vodka Satana (not her real name) who was Alex Bleach's Great Love but who, being a Gen X porn star from a marginalized community, Larry Dope treated as way less than human and ultimately considered competely disposable.
Refreshingly, though, one source of conflict that is largely absent from these narratives is transphobia or homophobia (though I prefer the terms transmesia and homesia - the suffix in these denoting hatred rather than fear, but the larger culture still insists on saying -phobia. Sigh). This is not, as you might expect, because there is an absence of LGBTQ+ characters; quite the contrary. Two who, while not central to the plot are still significant, are Marcia, a trans woman from Brazil, and Daniel, a trans man who used to be a porn star along with Vodka Satana and their dear friend Pamela Kant (Pamela becomes a very important figure in the Subu-Circle once it goes semi-nomadic; Daniel mostly tags along but also bonds more closely with the Zoomers than most of the crew). They're both terrific characters, though Daniel, Daniel is one of my favorites (though as presented in the television adaptation, he is something else; he is a dead ringer for "tranpa" Buck Angel, a problematic figure in trans circles for his insistence that [from what I can gather; I'm a cis woman in White-oming so all of my understanding of this culture is mediated by Twitter and YouTube] in order to actually be trans, one has to have had gender confirmation surgery. Anyway, Daniel is styled to have such a strong resemblance to him that it can't be a coincidence, which is wild. In the book, when I first encountered him, I remember thinking hey, here's someone who was a porn star before transitioning to a man, like an Anti-Buck Angel [Angel famously became a porn star with the schtick "the man with a pussy" after transitioning]. Neat. And I was picturing him as vaguely David Bowie-ish because I'm a cis woman from White-oming and Bowis is my go-to image for androgynous allure. But then, well, take a look at this here pair of images:
Anyway, as I mentioned on the episode of 2 Month Review that I crashed, this resemblance feels like it must be meaningful, but I'm not knowledgable enough to parse out what is meant. Except that Eloy Irref is purty). Daniel never claimed any dysphoria or anything like that, just decided that he was tired of experiencing life as a woman and was ready, after a career in porn, to try something new. Daniel is enjoying life as a great-looking man to the full, especially how no one talks down to him, he gets hired right away when he applies for jobs and gets no flack if he wants a raise or a promotion, he feels safe walking the streets even late at night, etc. I love this for him and I'm all for this as a valid reason for someone to transition if they really want to. The only other time I've seen this treated with this breathtaking simplicity is in the transition of Lady Donna to Lord Dono in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga (though there, Donna became Dono mostly so she could inherit a title in a stupidly patriarchal society). Catch up, Western Civilization, for shit's sake.
As for the other trans character, Marcia, she is to a small degree the object of a brief hit of internal transphobia on Vernon's part when he meets her at the coke fiend's loft, but it's very brief and I doubt she even has time to realize it. She's so beautiful and so cool that Vernon falls in love with her faster than he can deal with his mixed-up feelings, and then, even though her transition isn't quite complete, decides it doesn't even matter: she's the gorgeous girl for him. And she returns his feelings. Which causes big problems but not because she's trans! And ultimately, she plays the pivotal role in making sure the Subu-circle's flame is carried into the future.
Wow, just imagine what things were possible if the marginalized were always just given a chance to be people!
But, speaking of the marginalized, there's a ton of xenophobia on display in Vernon Subutex that is sometimes as shocking as the actual violence itself (of which, let me add again, there is plenty). At least two of the POV characters have running dialogues with themselves about how Those Filthy Immigrants have made everything worse in La France and often entertain thoughts that do not even stop at genocide as they wander down boulevards and weave through bars and beat the shit out of their wives and girlfriends (Patrice) or lovingly care for their daughter or their dog (Xavier). A third, possibly Zoomer aged or maybe even Milennial (you can tell this is a Gen X book because Milennials really don't factor in at all), is an out-and-out neo-Nazi who, seeking to attack the other greatest charcter I've encountered this year (Olga), assuming a passerby who's stopped to chat is one of Olga's People (homeless), beats him up so badly the poor slob ends up hospitalized in a coma. Did I mention there's a lot of violence in these books? There's a lot of violence in these books.
BUT, reprehensible and seemingly irredeemable as these characters are, Despentes leads us deeply enough into their souls and experiences, lets us see enough of their loves and longings, that by the end of Schnauzer we're devastated by their fates. Well, the Boomers are still 100% hatable throughout, but, hey, they're the villains, you know? These other guys like Patrice and Xavier are just our Worst Friends.***
They're also, occasionally, kind of funny, as when Xavier, surveying a row of yachts in port, internally rants "There’s only one flag that flies on these yachts: the flag of tax evaders who stash their money in offshore accounts, who cook the books, who aren’t subject to the same laws as everyone else" and eventually, because there's still a little bit of Angry Lefty in his bourgeois heart, concludes "Where are the fucking terrorists when you need one?" I was right there with him while he raged at the exploiter class and even got carried away with it enough to laugh out loud at his wishing terrorism upon them and BOOM, Despentes got me! I'm complicit in his shittiness, which shittiness I feel acutely just a sentence later when he then goes on, of course, to abuse the stereotypical Muslim Terrorist that lives rent free in his head for being so stupid and always picking the wrong targets. Whomp whomp.Are you fucking dumb or what? People weren’t even out of the Bataclan and there you were, already on Facebook writing #stopIslam? I couldn’t ring you at the time because I didn’t want to freak out the people in the bar I was stuck in, but I was dumbfounded that you’re this far gone. Have you no heart, or just no fucking brain cells? #stopIslam? What the fuck do you mean by that, dipshit? Stop Islam from what, you ignorant twat? What the hell is going on inside your head when you write shit like that? We should kill all refugees? Haven’t we had enough death as it is? Or maybe you haven’t had enough, dickwad? Hasn’t there been enough grief, enough anguish without you adding a sprinkle of your fuckwit frustrations?****
OLGA IS THE BEST, YOU GUYS. You don't have to agree with me, except you absolutely have to agree with me.
On the other hand, I can also imagine her feeling, whatever her original plans, that she was obligated to incorporate these historic tragedies into fiction set so very much in the same historical moment they occurred. There's no way these characters she'd created would be able to ignore, especially, the Bataclan shooting, any more than they would ignore the death of Lemmy from Motorhead or of David Bowie (both of whose deaths are prominently discussed). But she could have acknowledged these horrors in her novel without making them So Very Much the Point. Conversations about them, changes in plans, maybe some dramatic gestures or acts on the part of certain characters, even attacks on certain characters (I don't imagine Selim, for instance, would have had a very good time of it after Charlie Hebdo, being a college professor and teaching privileged and politically conscious French students and all), would suffice. But Despentes takes terror attacks right through to the end of the novel (barring the Olaf Stapledon-esque extended epilogue that takes the Subu-Circle's spiritual descendents far into the future) and detonates the whole thing with a rampage by a character we don't even meet until the penultimate chapter! At the instigation of Max, a character whom we didn't meet until a decent ways into the third book (though this is admittedly possibly ultimately at the instigation of one Larry Dope, whose patronage Max seeks)!
It's this last-minute seeming denouement that has me really puzzling over how I ultimately feel about these books. I'm more of a genre reader than a literary fiction reader, so my standards for a satisfying ending and a quality read are a bit different from those of Despentes' target audience, but I can't help but be annoyed that Max and Solange feel so tacked-on as characters, for all that Despentes did her usual fantastic job of showing them to us as well-rounded ones. Max's and Solange's choices make a fair bit of sense given what we know about them; it's just that they come into their prominence so hastily when we've spent several hundred pages with everybody else. I mean, maybe that's the point -- we never know who's carrying the gun containing the bullet with our name on it, and in this day and age if it's not someone we share a home and even children with, then it's probably a total stranger who doesn't even consider us a whole 'nother human being, we're just meat in the grocery store/train station/nightclub/elementary school/dancing like loons in an empty field in the middle of the night that doesn't know it's meat yet. But in a book that is so much about a very particular set of characters and the trajectories of lives that have come together and exploded apart and come back together again, I want what I want, and what I really wish had happened was that Max and Solange had been part of the story from way further back without having had, necessarily, to actually encounter the other characters -- as genre authors pull off all the time! They could at least have been introduced somewhere in Poodle, say. There was room. Heck, there was room further back in Schnauzer: we got a whole chapter about a woman who was a Janey-come-lately to the Subu-Circle's Convergences who herself mattered very little to the larger story except in that she is part of the convoluted path that brings Max into the group's orbit. I'd much rather have seen more of Solange's life than hers.*****
So, okay, clearly I'm still kind of peeved about this ending. But does it spoil my enjoyment of the books? I've gotta say no. Way too much of what is here is way too good, and, oh, guys, I haven't even really talked about my two favorite characters, but this is getting long, even for me, even though it's about three books. But if you haven't read them yet (but still read this piece?) and I haven't convinced you to give Vernon Subutex a chance yet, you don't deserve to meet The Hyena or Olga. You don't even deserve to meet Cokehead Kiko.
*A "pantser" is a fiction writer who composes a tale "by the seat of her pants" without any, or with very little, idea of where the story is going, often without even a clear ending in mind. She just lets the story happen in drafts and hacks it into shape later. A "plotter" envisions most, if not all, of the story ahead of time, has a clear ending in view, and keeps steering her material toward that ending, unless a better ending comes to her mind in the course of writing.
**Which, get ready for the dogs in this book, although the damned schnauzer on the cover of Schnauzer remains a mystery. The other two are named in the story and are beloved pets whose fates matter. Unlikely friendships form over the mutual love of dogs. The welfare of the dogs is never ignored or discounted in decisions made by the characters even as they become more and more untethered from the ordinary world. Get ready for the dogs. I'm choosing, until proven otherwise, to believe that the unnamed schnauzer of Schauzer is a pet Homeless Superheroine Olga adopted sometime between the breakup and reformation of the Subu-Circle. She's not the kind of woman to go that long without a dog in her life, homelessness be damned.
***A term I use to describe those people in your life to whom you are close like best friends but with whom you always seem to get into terrible trouble when you actually hang out with them, who bring out our worst judgment or worst impulses or are most likely to, say, call at 4am needing bailed out of jail for something stupid as opposed to the ones who are most likely to, say, answer the phone at 4am when the psychic wolf pack is chasing us down through the bloodstained snow of the soul. Also, characters like Patrice and Xavier for certain represent the shockingly large contingent of our generation who did, in fact, get more conservative/reactionary as they aged, who listened to the Dead Kennedys with us in the 80s and were definitely down for Lynching the Landlord but then maybe married well to a landlord's daughter or realized they sold more screenplays if they wore Armani jeans or lost out on one too many promotions at the factory to people with darker skin and emerged in middle age as full fledged reactionary fucks whom you really don't ever want to speak to again/wish they weren't pooping all over your Facebook feed but someone else in your life still loves them and so you do your best to tolerate them and just, like, mute them when they get too obnoxious on social media and don't go to too many gatherings where you know they'll be. I'm still astonished at how many of my passionate angry young friends have grown up to be Trumpkins, you guys. Still angry, but now angry at all the people they used to be angry for.
****Oh yeah, this is a very 21st century story. A whole lot of it takes place on or because of Facebook, and the Greatest Character, the Hyena, is a masterful grey hat hacker on whose good side you really want to stay. She doesn't get to stretch her skills as much as she might, though, because most of the other characters are really stupid about cybersecurity, but still.
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