Virginie Despentes' DEAR DICKHEAD (Tr Frank Wynn)

Epistolary novels have never been my favorite, but when its author is someone like Virginie Fucking Despentes I'm going to drop everything and read it anyway. 

Especially since it kind of sounds like an epistolary novel of hate, as the title, Dear Dickhead (Cher Connard in French), heavily implies. 

The correspondence that unfolds here is between a world famous French actress and celebrated beauty, Rebecca, and an almost as famous French novelist, Oscar. As we quickly learn, both of them have seen better days; Rebecca has hit middle age, is no longer much of a sex symbol and isn't getting much in the way of work anymore; Oscar has recently come to the attention of the #MeToo movement for his treatment of one of his first publicists, a woman named Zoe Katana (gotta love Despentes' character names; this is the best since Vodka Satana in the Vernon Subutex trilogy) at the start of his career.

They knew each other slightly as children, when Rebecca was the best friend of Oscar's older sister, Corrine, who makes a kind of side appearance in the novel as a topic of discussion between the two, but Corinne is not terribly important. What matters is that Oscar, newly in shock, as he excuses himself, from his exposure via his former publicist's blog, recently made some very unkind remarks to the press about Rebecca's appearance these days. And Rebecca, not one to suffer dickheads gladly, emailed him a scathing personal reply that is... very much the kind of thing I read Virginie Despentes for.

I don't think anyone would truly want to read a novel-length flame war, however, and Despentes has other things in mind than just a moderately novel storytelling device. Not long after the opening exchange of fire, Rebecca and Oscar settle down a bit, not only out of mutual respect for Corinne or their own childhood connection to one another and the memories they share, but out of a simple curiosity that blossoms into empathy and then into a combative kind of friendship. Part of the catalyst for this is Rebecca's own investigation of Oscar's sudden #MeToo infamy, exposed when the publicist becomes a middling internet-famous feminist blogger and tells her side of the story, which we get to see in interludes quoting entries from her blog. 

Rebecca neither leaps to Oscar's defense nor takes Zoe's side, but, through her imperfect understanding of Zoe's experience as filtered through her own, makes a very good attempt at leading Oscar to consider how his behavior might have seemed very different from the point of view of an unwilling object of his attentions. Very good, but not perfect: Rebecca hasn't been as powerless as Zoe was since she was a young teenager, and has since lived the cosseted and insulated life of an international superstar. Still, she starts getting through to Oscar, enough to lead him to start reconsidering many aspects of how he has lived his life and treated other people -- and his relationship with drugs and alcohol.

Before we know it, Rebecca and Oscar have more or less talked each other into getting clean, with Oscar starting to actively go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and soon realizing that he's actually finally found the only people in perhaps the world that don't care about the sexual harassment allegations against him, and, once the COVID-19 epidemic first hits and changes the world/ Rebecca eventually follows him, first lurking on the online meetings Oscar has to resort to when Shelter In Place becomes the new norm and then, discovering the same value that Oscar has found in his participation, cautiously turning on the camera and allowing others in recovery to know that she is there and is also finally ready to admit that her own drug use has maybe been a problem.

The two never share a physical space; everything unfolds in true epistolary fashion through their emails and bits from Zoe's blog that allow us not only to see an outside perspective on what they are doing but also, at least from Zoe's side, the price that Zoe is paying for speaking up as part of #MeToo, because of course Manosphere internet trolls start harassing her, threatening her, letting her know via disgusting physical parcels that they know where she lives and driving home that she is trapped there while the epidemic rages unchecked.

The character arcs thus explored are extraordinary and moving without ever feeling sentimental or manipulative; both Rebecca and Oscar are acerbic, brave and, eventually, honest. They never stop needling each other; Rebecca never really stops calling Oscar a dickhead even after they've both come to realize that they genuinely care about each other. Their individual voices are wickedly fun and brutally entertaining. Zoe's is less so, but she still gets a chance, if somewhat indirectly, to appeal to the reader's understanding and empathy. The result is a novel that not only met my exceedingly high expectations of Virginie Despentes as a novelist (who, let's face it, made my automatic buy list long ago) but exceeded them. Despentes is an absolute wonder, and I can't wait to see what she does next, if she chooses to do anything next at all, which I sincerely hope she does!

Virginie Despentes' BYE BYE BLONDIE (Tr Siân Reynolds)

"Every time I find a guy I really like, I drive him nuts and he chucks me out... You know the effect I have on guys: at first they love it that I'm in such a bad place, they always want to help. But if you overdo it, it's bad for the furniture."

Is there a Virginie Despentes Cinematic Universe out there in the ether? Or is it just a thing that happens in realistic literary fiction that a reader can 100% imagine an author's other characters showing up in the backgrounds of that author's other books. 

I can totally imagine Gloria*, the boozy, angry, messed up heroine of Bye Bye Blondie, who named herself for a song Patti Smith made ubiquitous, turning up at one of Vernon Subutex' al fresco Convergences, is what I'm saying.

She'd probably be the only one Bleach's Beats didn't work on, and thus constantly getting yelled at for slam dancing, though. 

Bye Bye Blondie is, of course, an earlier work than the trilogy that captured my crusty old heart a while back, but its heroine would fit right in with the huge cast of characters that populate the Vernon Subutex novels. She's the right age, for a start, and has the right sensibilities and the right proximity to, but inability to share in, success.** She's tough but loves deeply, abrasive but sentimental, drunk out of her mind a lot of the time and really kind of violent; when she first encounters her old boyfriend, Eric, she leaves the encounter wondering why she didn't punch him in the jaw. And it goes without saying that she has fantastic taste in music. She is, in short, exactly as the great Molly Crabapple drew her on simulated notebook paper for the American cover art, here. "Her life has few good points, except that she's used to it."

I really shouldn't like her, but I sure do. Though I wouldn't want her in my actual life, of course. I've got my own shit to deal with. And my medical bills are already insane. 

Anyway, Gloria is also, as the action gets going, in exactly the same situation as Vernon is at the beginning of his odyssey, though for different reasons. Vernon was long-term sponging off a friend who'd just died; Gloria made herself homeless one angry fit at a time, until she and her boyfriend, Lucas had their final fight and she, well, she kicked herself out more than Lucas kicking her out, but either way it is her violent craziness and her refusal to address it that have left her couch surfing in Nancy.

Enter Eric, who broke her heart years and years ago, now a big time TV presenter with TV looks and TV clothes and a TV chauffer stopping his car in the rain when he arrives on location in Nancy -- and spots Gloria stumbling down the street, not long after she finally stormed out of her latest ex-boyfriend Lucas' apartment for good. Eric is unaccountably delighted to see her and urges her to meet up with him for a drink later that night, when he's done with work. Mostly just to get rid of him, she kind of half-assedly agrees and even tells him about her preferred dive bar where everybody knows her nom de guerre (as in "Gloria" [G-L-O-R-I-A] is not the name her parents gave her), towards which he was preventing her from heading by keeping her standing with him in the rain. I might wish I'd punched him, too.

Auspicious beginning for a grand romance, no?

In different ways, both of them would eventually realize what a very poor preparation punk rock had been for later life. Too much fun, too much utopianism. Getting back into reality wouldn't be a pleasant experience. 

Of course, this isn't the beginning, exactly. No. Gloria and Eric originally met when Gloria was just 15 years old (and he was around that age, too, presumably) when they were both involuntarily committed, she by her parents, he by the authorities who picked him up as a vagrant while his parents were off on unspecified exotic travels, to a mental institution, there to be locked up against their will for many weeks with a motley assortment of ugly, gross old people (aged 30 - 50. You know, ancient, decrepit, how are they still alive?) with real problems except they seem mostly to boil down to refusals to grow up, according to Gloria? Gazing askance at them all at the mature age of 15? Anyway, Erik is young like her, and while kind of camp and effeminate, good looking enough to sleep with, except she doesn't get around to that until later in life. No, his parents come for him a good month and change before Gloria's come for her, and they exchanged letters! On paper with envelopes and stamps! Remember those? Plus he sent his "Blondie" cassettes to listen to on the walkman he left her after hers got confiscated (she was listening to Motörhead too loudly, according to another inmate) in which he smuggled small amounts of marijuana, because of course he did, this was young love in the 1980s, baby!

My mom is probably reading this and raising her eyebrows right now, but dude, we lived in the middle of nowhere and the cops actually did their jobs back then. Nobody was going to go to all the effort it took to get drugs into the Upper North Platte River Valley of Wyoming and then share them with someone as uncool as the book nerd speech kid cop's daughter. They just called me Narc and shoved me back into my locker. I was perfectly safe. As long as the janitor was still around to let me out, but that wasn't anybody's worry but mine was it? Ptoo!

But oh, didn't I wish I could hang out with people like Gloria back then. I would have been her pen pal while she was in the hospital and everything. I would have sent her all the Cure tapes I could find. Sigh.

Adult Gloria is a rather less appealing friendship prospect, though, as she let her heartbreak over Eric stop her from developing much beyond her angry little punkette phase. At 35 or so she is on public assistance, a confirmed day drinker, not quite as pretty as she was as a teen and lets her most violent impulses run unchecked. If she's not a danger to others, she's a danger to herself if there's no one around to beat up. She's had a string of terrible love affairs that always end badly and violently, and her best friend is an older heroin junkie named Michel who just laughs at her when she loses her temper. 

Into this paradisical existence comes Eric, who does indeed show up at her bar and, even though she left it hours before, sticks around in the hopes that she'll come back, meanwhile charming the socks off of all her crummy bummy drinking buddies who are falling all over themselves at the chance to be in the same room as a real live TV star. Their opinion of Gloria is changed forever when they learn that Eric considers her the One That Got Away and also the Love Of His Life!

Eventually, of course, the two reunite and whether it's true love or just neither of them has the strength of will to avoid making the same mistake twice, they get a kind of second chance. But this time, if things go wrong, they can't blame parents or prejudice or anything but their own deeply flawed characters. A kind of romance does indeed develop, but Gloria is still Gloria. If it succeeds, it will be in spite of rather than because of this fact, looks like.

Me, I think if I ran into 35 year old Gloria, I'd squeak and run. But I'd probably still love her from afar. Very afar. So afar. Just like I know I'd never be cool enough to hang with her author, who, also a filmmaker, made a film of Bye Bye Blondie recast as a lesbian love story that I'm gonna have to hunt down sometime. But I know there's no way I'd survive an encounter with Blondie. Bye!

*Who is almost exactly my age, and I'll probably never get used to that, having been raised, first,  on the classic literary Dead White Male canon and second, on the 20th century Boomer Narcissist canon. It's like I barely have room in my head for a woman who's anything like me. I have to shove Rabbit and Garp and David Copperfield and Jean Valjean aside to make room for a literary figure who, while both way cooler and way more fucked up than I am, has shared my actual progress through the world so closely. And I'm still a privileged American white woman! It must be so much weirder, but also even more refreshing, for actual demographic minorities to encounter their own Glorias.

**She even has dealings with an unnamed producer type who could very well be a younger Larry Dope from Vernon Subutex, and at one point she and Eric wash up outside a record store in Paris that could easily be Revolver before Vernon was old enough to buy it and run it into the ground.