Virginie Despentes' Vernon Subutex trilogy (translated by Frank Wynne)

"When Lou Reed is cast as the messenger of fate, you can be sure that the news is not good." - Virginie Despentes in Vernon Subutex 3

I really want to know if cool-as-fuck filmmaker/writer/all around bad ass lady of La France Virginie Despentes is a "pantser" or a "plotter"* -- a bit of a new experience for me since I usually don't care to know this about anybody. But here, here it matters to me because I'm still making my mind up about how Vernon Subutex ends. 

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:

Eloy Irref as Daniel in the Vernon Subutex television adaptation

Buck Angel in some random photo I grabbed off of Google 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.

But so okay, let's talk about terrorism

Terrorism and its impact on 21st century French life is as central a theme to Vernon Subutex as any examination of the negative impacts of late stage capitalism; perhaps even more so, as Despentes starts to explore the impact of terrorism through the aforementioned, frequently Islamophobic, inner dialogues of Patrice and Xavier and the Nazi thug, and also by allowing us to spend lots of time with some characters with Muslim backgrounds: the family of the aforementioned Vodka Satana (not her real name) who began her adult life as the wife of a secularized Muslim professor, Selim, had a daughter, Aicha, with him, but then left them to live a more adventurous life. Terrorism isn't up front and explicitly a factor in their lives so much as part of their entire lived experience as minorities within a larger culture that isn't as tolerant of them as maybe it should be -- at least at first. Which makes their fates, in the shorter term and the longer, extra poignant. I've already mentioned what became of Vodka; Selim and Aicha get much more page time, with Selim having devoted his entire life to raising Aicha and sheltering her from the truth about what her mother went on to become. For her part, once Aicha reached her teens and young adulthood, she decided to reject the "secular" part of her father's identity. Aicha as a young adult wears hijab, prays the requisite number of times per day, knows her Koran pretty well, is as devout a Muslim as a young woman with an apostate dad in a non-Muslim country can be. Watching her pull away from him is affecting, but in spite of it all, its the strength of character she developed under his care that lets her come to understand his choices and those of her long-dead mother when she finally learns the truth about Vodka Satana, surrounded by Vernon Subutex' strange circle of friends. Then and only then does terrorisim explicitly enter her life, but not in the way you'd probably expect.

It's through the Subu-Circle that she meets another Zoomer, Celeste, whose father was a regular at Vernon's store in the back in the and brought her there from time to time. Celeste works in the bar that becomes the Subu-Circle's indoor hangout, and has grown up admiring Vernon and all of his let's-admit-it-kind-of-lost friends, so when she finds out about Aicha's mother and the revenge hate-on Aicha has developed for one Larry Dope, Celeste is in. And then they find their perfect accomplice: Larry Dope's somewhat-estranged privileged-but-knows-it-but-isn't-commited-enough-not-to-renounce-his-privilege son, Antoine aka Tony Dope. And this trio, together with a small cell of South American immigrants with a taste for direct action, begin a cycle of terror all on their own.

As the implications of this just begin to hit the Subu-Circle, so do a lot of more famous, larger scale incidents. The attack on Charlie Hebdo, for one; the November 2015 Paris attacks, including the shooting at the Bataclan concert hall, for another. Neither of these incidents were even a twinkle in a perpetrator's eye at the time the first book, Frenchie, was written; possibly not even Poodle (Vernon Subutex 2) had hit the stores yet. Schnauzer, though, is almost centered on these tragedies, as the Subu-Circle, already somewhat rocked by the revenge plot effected by Aicha, Celeste and Tony Dope, disintigrates over a possible inheritance (oy), and later reunite at least partly in shared grief over these incidents and the chilling effect they've had on public spaces in France in general and the night life these characters are still partial to in particular. 

But lest you think it brings everybody fully back together, persuades people like Patrice and Xavier that they were wrong, or anything that simple, rest assured, it's not that simple, as when Olga, who originally bonded tightly with Xavier over their mutual love of dogs even before he accidentally took a coma-inducing beating for her at the boots of some neo-Nazis, tears into Xavier pretty quickly on recconecting:

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.

And of course, terrorism is how the Subu-Circle meets its untimely end -- which brings me back around to wondering about whether Virginie Despentes is a plotter or a pantser. Given that the two terrorist attacks in France that the rest of the world probably knows the best hadn't even happened when she started writing Frenchie -- was terrorism already so much on her mind as a thing that happened in Paris that she'd already planned to incorporate it into these novels from the start? Possibly. After all, terrorism has been a fact of French life for over 200 years. France colonized Islamic nations back in the day, and is now welcoming immigrants from those nations in great numbers, and not all of those immigrants are happy with how they're treated once arrived, to say nothing of how their entire nations were treated throughout history. Modern French citizens who aren't blind jingoists like Xavier and Patrice feel some responsibility for all of this and have complicated feelings about Muslim immigrants and how they are treated, how they respond to how they are treated, and how much responsibility a modern Parisian bears for it all -- sort of like Americans with our history of bad behavior all over the world. I can definitely imagine Despentes having already had this on her mind, held this in store for her characters, all along.

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. 

Go on with ya. Or at least head on over to Topic (one of a zillion streaming platforms, yeah yeah, but it's a keeper if you like international TV shows and movies or just want to practice your foreign language comprehension. Me, I like both. Ask me about CSI: Taipei sometime) and feast your eyes and ears on the only extant season to date of Vernon Subutex: the TV show, which adapts the whole of Frenchie. It's not a long season; you can definitely watch it all during your seven day free trial.

*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. 

*****But yeah, easy for me to say, I'm just some literary fangirl with a blog and why don't I write my own damn novels if I'm so smart. Shut up. At least I'm blogging again. Even though it's physically painful to do so. Phooey.

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.

T. Kingfisher's A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES

I come to the work of Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher, in somewhat backwards fashion. I knew her first as the "Wombat Test Subject" on her husband Kevin Sonney's podcast, Productivity Alchemy, on which show I've fallen way behind because I've pretty much given up on productivity but still occasionally enjoy, mostly for the stories of the couple's pets and livestock and Vernon's description of her writing and illustrating processes. She is a woman of considerable gifts and a singular speaking voice and is beloved of most of the people whose opinions on books matter to me, so got filed as "an author I know I'll like and I've got to try sometime" but that guarantee of quality somehow perversely reduces the urgency of sampling an author's work. See also Leonora Carrington, on whom I slept for years. 

Anyway then Vernon, writing here as Kingfisher, wrote a southern gothic novel A House with Good Bones, in which the heroine is not only an entomologist but an archaeological entomologist. Zoinks!

So of course I knew there'd be tension between the habits of skepticism and demanding evidence that are so deeply ingrained in most fictional (if not always in actual) scientists and whatever supernatural forces were supplying the horror; I was not ready for Kingfisher's very successful attempt to import the elements of gothic horror into a story set in a tract house built in the 1990s.

Our heroine, Sam, has had to leave her latest excavation while some human remains found there are investigated, so she decides to go visit her mother,  Edie, still living in the house Sam grew up in with Edie, Sam's older brother, Brad and, for a while, Edie's viciously unpleasant grandmother, whom Sam always called Grand Mae. Mae originally owned the house and ruled it with an iron hand and a shedful of garden tools for maniacally tending her flawless rose garden, demanding of her progeny an adherence to the impossible standards of 1950s TV family perfection that no actual humans ever achieved. After Mae's death, Edie made the house a bit more interesting and comfortable, with brightly colored paint on the walls and actually interesting art that didn't depict things like Confederate weddings hanging from them. 

So imagine Sam's surprise when she discovers her grandmother's nasty taste again dominating the house, and the kind of detail only someone like Sam would notice: a complete lack of invertebrate life in the rose garden.

Oh, and a local vulture -- as in the actual bird, not an epithet for a nasty neighbor, though there's one of them, too -- hanging out on top of the mailbox. Often more than one. 

The family secrets that emerge are straight out of the Women with Great Hair Escaping Castles playbook but don't feel forced into this very contemporary story; Kingfisher developed just the right background to explain the creepiness without having to resort to badly relocated Native American burial grounds or any of that foma, and in Sam and Edie gave us a delightful mother and daughter dynamic to enjoy while their world disintegrates around them. Even more delightfully, one of the vultures, named Hermes by his hedge-witchy keeper Gail, an older woman who worked in wildlife rehabilitation while she was Mae's much-disliked hippie neighbor but now lives the retired life of an herbalist with her last patient. Gail is pretty excellent, too, but Hermes' bizarre charisma always steals her thunder even before he earns his weird halo. Rounding out the duo is hunky, handy Phil, the grandson of the nasty neighbor who works as Edie's handyman and while there might be some romantic sparks between him and Sam, Kingfisher adds these with a light hand that never allows them to distract us from the thorny peril her characters are in.

So I'd recommend A House with Good Bones to anyone, but perhaps especially to the fans of John Bellairs; A House with Good Bones felt very much like a Lewis Barnavelt book for grown-ups -- though conversely, there's no reason, apart from occasional swearing, why a precocious kid fan of Bellairs wouldn't enjoy the hell out of this book. I could have used more insects, though. But we all know I'm rarely satisfied in that department. I'm glad that I got what I did, though, while on this wild ride of a story. Go get it!

Herve Le Tellier's THE ANOMALY (Tr. by Adriana Hunter, Narr. by Dominic Hoffman)

A phrase that repeats often as Herve Le Tellier's The Anomaly gets going is "Maybe this is happiness," usually describing something banal and material, or at least basic, implying that if this is what happiness is, it's been oversold, at least to the cast of characters whose mini-biographies form the first part of the novel. Among these are a novelist who wrote a book called The Anomaly and committed suicide (this is not much of a spoiler; it happens early in the book and it's one of the pivotal issues that touches off the many philosophical conundra that pepper Le Tellier's The Anomaly as the fictionalized author of The Anomaly achieves a posthumous level of fame and respect he never enjoyed in life and if you're thinking of Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, you're supposed to; the book gets an explicit name check in the account of the dead author's success.)

But the fictionalized writer of that other The Anomaly is far from being the most important character in this The Anomaly. After all, as far as we get to know, his The Anomaly is not, in fact, the text we are reading here. That would be almost too Borgesian, no?

Anyway, there are lots of other characters more interesting and more important to the story than this author. Like a professor of statistics and probability who, in his undergraduate days at M.I.T. cooked up something called "Protocol 42" as a set of guidelines to follow when something truly unexplainable, unpredictable or unprecedented happens -- when there is an anomaly that can't be handled by any normal means. He chose 42 for its name because Douglas Adams, of course -- a signal that he and his friends who cooked it up together never in a million years expected it ever to be taken seriously, let alone actually employed by the U.S. Government, even after U.S. Gov made them all sign contracts requiring that they be permanently available to be called on at any time, no questions asked, if it was ever deemed necessary to activate Protocol 42. Which, of course, is what The Anomaly, as in the Le Tellier novel, is actually about.

In March of 2021, an Air France plane traveled through some very adverse weather but fought through to JFK International Airport, sporting considerable hail damage but otherwise all right, and its several hundred passengers disembarked and went on with their lives.

Then, in June of that same year, the exact same plane, with the exact same crew and passenger manifest and serial numbers, the exact same everything, emerged from a similar storm and sent a Mayday message to JFK because the damage was a bit more severe this time around, only to be diverted to a New Jersey military base under fighter escort because all this had already happened three months before and this was too weird to allow the plane to come to JFK and disembark, etc. Yes, this all feels very familiar. We've seen the TV show, etc. But this is a French novel, you guys, and it's the Frenchest thing I've read since I finally got tired of Michel Houellebecq's shit (and yes, this includes the terrific Vernon Subutex trilogy I enjoyed last year), so, buckle up, there's going to be a whole lot of philosophical speculation going on. Starting with a lot of attention being paid to how this manifestation of a duplicate, a perfect copy in every way, of the plane and all of its contents, including a few hundred passengers, is an almost incontrovertible argument in favor of the Simulation Theory, which, in brief, states that our entire phenomenological cosmos is actually a computer simulation, none of us are real, we're all just programs running in a vast godlike computer system called Deep Thought, wait no, not that, but all the other stuff? Yes.

But again, the novelist isn't the interesting passenger. Not when there's an honest-to-Ludlum international assassin who had been traveling from Paris to NYC on his latest assignment (but left behind a wife and children and charming double life in Paris -- double lives are a theme here, my friends)! Except, we don't get to see him much, just enough to see how he handles coming home to Paris and finding another version of himself living the aforementioned charming life with wife and children and reacting the way a guy like him might react, since he alone of all the passengers is the only one who didn't get the memo about what was going on because he escaped from US Gov too soon to get in on the briefing and counseling sessions. D'oh!

There's also a Nigerian rap star who, between March and June, wrote a song that went batshit viral on the internet and catapulted him to fame on the level of being invited to collaborate with Sir Elton John on a song, because our Nigerian, stage named Slimboy, is actually gay in a country that still considers homosexuality a serious crime, see, double life again! How he -- the he's, the Slimboys -- handles the sudden dopplegangery is one of my favorite bits of The Anomaly along with...

And also there is the issue that suddenly hundreds of people who have been going about their ordinary lives in this world suddenly have perfect doppelgangers, exactly like them in every detail except they are three months younger and have no knowledge or memory of the three months that have elapsed since the original plane landed. Among the passengers on this plane were the novelist who wrote the in-book novel The Anomaly and then committed suicide; suddenly the novelist is alive again and ready to resume his life just as if it were still March 2021, except, of course, he doesn't even have the germ of the idea for The Anomaly yet so whatever experiences led to the writing of the novel and the author's suicide are quite beyond his ken.

Slight digression time. This book was written and translated and published at a very specific moment in 21st century history, and the President of the United States is very much a character in The Anomaly, only it's pretty obvious from tons of context clues and the POTUS' general behavior and way of speaking that Le Tellier assumed the United States would be dumb enough to re-elect our most embarrassing POTUS and sketches us a pretty merciless portrait of that man without ever naming him. It's sort of darkly fun to imagine that guy handling a philosophical crisis like this story poses, almost as much fun as it is to watch Le Tellier's merciless skewering of American pop culture in the person of Stephen Colbert and The Late Show, an episode of which is depicted in minute detail when Colbert et al land an interview with a pair of doppelgangers who are very attractive young women willing to go along with the producers to create some Fucking Great Television with, uh, unfortunate results.

OK, back to the others. Like the aging French architect who finds himself with a second chance at saving his relationship with his much younger girlfriend, or rather, in learning from his March self how the March self ruined said relationship with the girlfriend's March self and making a plan not to make the same mistake. And the girlfriend herself, who is a single mom with a young son who suddenly has, not just two mommies, but two absolutely identical mommies except one of them doesn't remember anything since she took a trip with her boyfriend in March.

What I'm saying is, Le Tellier took a rather tired trope -- airline experiences mysterious event and passengers lives are weird forever -- and turned it into a specific way to examine a lot of different solutions to the problem of What If Suddenly There Were Two Of Me on both a personal and a worldwide scale. Being a French novelist not unlike Houellebecq, Le Tellier does not think the rest of society, especially not American society, will handle the advent of a few hundred duplicated human beings well, let alone the news that potentially one of the less hopeful ontological interpretations of our existence is proven pretty much true, and I wish I could say I thought he took this too far but unfortunately, as events just this last week or so have proven all over again, I think Le Tellier was right on the money about how badly a lot of us would behave.

All of this is conveyed beautifully by the smooth voice and precise diction (as in consonants so crisp they sound almost British) I last enjoyed in the gigantic audio edition of Chuck Wendig's Wanderers (co-narrated with fellow audio narrating superstar Xe Sands), who performs the difficult feat of giving each character their own voice and flavor without pushing through into voice acting, meaning he also gives female characters the right hint of femininity without falling into caricature that I so appreciate.

As for translator Adriana Hunter, I have nothing to say about her work, which in my book is a compliment in that it's pretty great when a translator does so well that they seem to disappear into the translated work, where often I notice a translator for a weird word choice that sends me down rabbit holes to find out if the weird phrasing originated with the author or the translator. No, here there were only philosophical rabbit holes, and that was enough.

Maybe this is happiness. 

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!

Emmanuel Carrere's V13: CHRONICLE OF A TRIAL (Tr John Lambert)

I was emotionally unprepared for what awaited me within Emanuel Carrere's V13: Chronicle of a Trial. I imagine few readers are prepared, except perhaps for those who were present for the terrible events in Paris on November 13, 2015, or who attended the trial of the surviving accused of the multiple attacks at a nightclub, a sports arena, and a few cafes.

Nor did I even know that this same group of men were also responsible for suicide bombing attacks in Belgium, on an airport and a train station, on March 22, 2016, by which time I was even more distracted by events here in the U.S.

Let's be real; the attack I previously knew as "the Bataclan shootings" mostly escaped my notice; there were ridiculously awful things unfolding closer to home then, and I don't follow the Eagles of Death Metal -- the band playing the Bataclan that night -- or international football -- there was a friendly match between France and Germany at the Stade de France -- very closely. I would probably still have been pretty ignorant of this whole affair had it not been a significant element of Virginie Depentes' Vernon Subutex trilogy, which she was still writing when the attacks took place and into which she wrote them with devastating effectiveness. 

Oddly enough, it was as I was grabbing Despentes' newest novel, Dear Dickhead (coming soon to a blog near you) off of Netgalley that I saw V13*, recognized the author (Carrere penned my favorite biography of Phillip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead), and noticed the coincidence: she who first made me take serious notice of the Bataclan attack had a new book out, and a book about the trial was there for the taking at the same time. How could I not get them both?

Carrere was present for almost every day of the nine-month trial of the 14 men accused of helping plan or abetting the attacks; most of the men who actually entered the locations, fired the guns, and activated the suicide vests, died in the attacks or in later battles with police (some in Belgium, where the same Islamic State cell carried out additional attacks in early 2016). One of the defendants was supposed to blow himself up but changed his mind; some others were caught up helping him escape; others rented the cars or the apartments in which the attackers stayed, or watched ISIS beheading videos with the attackers at their hangout spot in Belgium back in the day.

Normally propaganda hides horror. Here it puts it on show. The Islamic State doesn't say: this is war, sadly for good to triumph we must commit terrible acts. No, it lauds itself for its sadism. It uses sadism, displays of sadism, and permission to be sadistic to recruit.

As I read Carrere's careful, vivid and extremely empathetic account of the trial, my mind kept looking for diversions from the tragedy, often using my ignorance as an excuse. Thus upon discovering that three of the attackers who killed and died that day rode into Paris in a SEAT, I took time out to reflect on how the only other time I've encountered that model of car in literature was in Graham Greene's charmingly bittersweet Monsignor Quixote, in which the title character and a Communist ex-mayor of a Spanish town drive around the countryside in a SEAT they've christened Rocinante. What becomes of my pleasant associations with that car -- which I assure you has not once crossed my mind since I read the Greene novel sometime in the late 1980s or so -- I started wondering. No, Kate, focus. It's not like this book is boring. It's just unbelievably tragic and tough and terrible. Because Carrere, and his English translator John Lambert, are committed to putting me right there in the courtroom while a few hundred witnesses and victims, investigators and, yes, perpetrators, tell their stories, and some very capable and committed defense attorneys try to do right by their clients... in an utterly unfamiliar-to-me justice system.

In the course of testimony, which includes that of François Hollande (who was the president of France at the time of the attacks), something happens which I can't imagine ever happening in a U.S. trial: the actions of the host nation are called into question, considered seriously as justification for what the accused and the deceased attackers did. France was heavily involved in bombing Syria, attacking the Assad regime that had mounted the first big backlash against the Arab Spring and which was continuing to repress its people -- but also, in attacking the territory ruled by the regime, harming civilians. The V13 attackers, many of whom had gone to Syria to defend Islam, felt that they were striking back. If they were culpable, so was France. And many other countries, including mine.

Carrere also devotes time to the stories of the defendants themselves, several of whom were close friends with the ringleader of V13, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and were involved at various levels in his journey to Syria to help the Islamic State help Assad's victims to fight back, and to establish and defend their hoped-for caliphate. Some even were along for the trip and spent time in Syria, even to bringing along their families -- an account of the experiences of one of their wives is especially memorable and harrowing.

Many of the attorneys on both sides, many of whom became friendly acquaintances of his during the Long months of the trial, also get time in Carrere's spotlight. On both sides they were highly skilled, professional and committed to finding the truth and seeing justice done.

In sum, if you know nothing about the attacks, if you want to know more about them, if you want to understand better what turns ordinary immigrants into terrorist killers, or just more about the French justice system and the investigative process that uncovered the identities of the assailants, living and dead, then you owe yourself a look at V13. If none of those things interest you, but you appreciate top level journalism and non-fiction writing, then you owe yourself a look at V13. Even if non-fiction isn't usually your bag and you just appreciate a compelling story and good storytelling, you owe yourself a look at V13.

Just maybe keep some tissues handy.

*The title refers to the day of the attack -- V for "Vendredi" ("Friday" in French) and 13 for the day of the month. Yes, the Paris Attacks occurred on Friday the 13th because of course they did.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666: THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS (tr by Natasha Wimmer)

There's a really neat passage very early on in this first of the five volumes that make up Roberto Bolaño's posthumous doorstop novel, 2666, which has next to nothing to do with the plot or any other developments within the volume or the novel as a whole, but gives an early hint of at least one reason why so many people outright revere Roberto Bolaño as rendered by Natasha Wimmer in English:

The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned around (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.*

This passage is especially exquisite in John Lee's note perfect narration of the audio edition of "The Part About the Critics" -- his onomontopaeic rendering of the (drops) is goddamned art. But more about Lee in a bit.

I have a weird history with 2666. When an American edition was announced back in 2008, I pre-ordered it in a sweaty fever of excitement, ready to see if it would give me the kind of cramp from carrying it around that Infinite Jest did back in my 20s. I reckoned not, since I'd switched from foot-commuting with an overstuffed backpack of books and whatnot (seriously, if EDC was a thing in the 90s, I'd have been its queen. It was ridiculous, the shit I had in my backpack every day) to bike commuting, with the heavy stuff in panniers. But when it arrived, I had gotten distracted by... something. This was before I'd started this blog, before I was on GoodReads; metrics and tracking data not available, so I don't remember what it was that distracted me, but I'm sure it was very shiny.

So I didn't actually pick it up to read until it was kind of too late for me to do so, as in, I didn't start reading it until the chronic pain that has come to warp everything about my entire life started warping my life and making things like holding a giant 900+ page book and turning its pages an exercise in agony (but hey, it could have been worse. I could have waited for the trade paperback. Can't do those even a little bit, trade paperbacks). But the buzz about it was still strong, and the first section, "The Part About the Critics", had such a strong whiff of my very favorite book, probably of all time, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (the first ebook I ever bought despite owning a first edition hardcover, because I wanted to spare further wear and tear on that hardcover more than I wanted not to spend ten bucks on a book I already owned) that I gritted my teeth and soldiered on for a while, but found myself interspersing this painful-but-fascinating experience with other books as has always been my bad habit, but soon I was finishing whole other novels in between bouts with the behemoth, and then whole series of novels, and then...

I know I eventually read the whole thing, but it was a horrible slog, and not necessarily because of anything inherent to the novel itself. I didn't remember things, didn't want to page physically back to find what I was missing, and eventually that kind of thing spoiled my enjoyment almost as much as the screeching pain in my hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders etc. did.

Fast foward many years. It's 2021. I'm watching the 2 Month Review podcast while enjoying the hell out of Vernon Subutex, and one of the guests is professional translator Katie Whittimore, who at that time was, I think, just wrapping up her translation of the Bolaño-esque Last Words on Earth, and I thought, hey, it's high time I gave 2666 another try. And I had an Audible credit burning in my pocket. And I figured, what the hell.

Then the kids at 2 Month Review decided that 2666 was going to be the next big honkin' book they tackle, and books like this are always fun to read with pals, so here I am, giving it another go and this time I'm loving it entirely. Amazing what a lack of physical discomfort can do. Plus, the thought of having other people to talk to about it (which was lacking in my 2008-or-so life). Anyway, the gang's first episode of their season devoted to 2666 dropped this week (and Katie is a full-time co-host for it!). Give it a watch or a listen. The discussion went to some very weird places.

But so, "The Part About the Critics", which is the first of the five "books" that comprise 2666. Ahem.

As I mentioned, this first part gives strong Foucault's Pendulum vibes, in that it chiefly concerns a circle of four literary academics/critics who are all obsessed with the output and career of a mysterious German author (with an Italianate surname), Benno von Archimboldi. We have the Frenchman, Jean-Claude Pelletier, the Spaniard Manuel Espinoza, the Englishwoman (and only woman in the club) Liz Norton, and the Italian Piero Morini (I think I wrote a novel like this when I was 11. I remember bugging my mom to come up with good names for a Frenchman and a Spaniard and an Italian and a German, but they were traveling by ship and about to encounter pirates). They hop from conference to conference all over Europe in that enviable-seeming way that European intellectuals seem always to be doing, become, essentially, the Mean Group of German Literature (but of course don't see themselves that way), get overly entangled (sometimes literally) in each other's lives while still actually hardly knowing each other outside the sphere of their mutal obsession (while thinking they know each other very well indeed and not just because both Pelletier and Espinoza wind up having overlapping love affairs with Norton), and go on odd little side quests trying to learn more about their famously reclusive and mysterious literary hero.

There is a famous passage in the first half of this volume, in which a story-within-a-story (within a story) that is sort of kind of about Archimboldi but is really mostly about a Frisian woman's adventures in 1920s Argentina. It is all told in one extraordinarily run-on sentence that takes up almost six pages in my first edition hardcover. Everybody talks about it; it's a pretty wild thing and quite a shaggy dog story that really kind of thematically prefigures a decent amount of what's to come in 2666. It is, however, a whole 'nother degree of remarkable in the audio book edition, and not just because it takes up a full 15 minutes of narration at regular speed. Once again, John Lee is perfection in rendering it, but here he benefits from the hand of an unknown production lackey whose job it was to edit out the inevitable flubs and coughs and misreadings that are part of every audio book narrator's raw performed recording, because that person (or people) also has to edit out any breath sounds. Which is something nobody ever notices or remarks on in ordinary audio books, of course, but in the Blackstone Audio/John Lee English language edition of 2666 this passage reaches new heights of sheer uncanniness, for while Lee of course pauses very briefly between clauses, there is nary a breath sound or even enough of a pause for a breath to be taken for the whole 15 minutes.

I know this because I was already deeply interested in how this passage would be handled when I first sat down with this audio book, and then I played it back again many, many times in sheer awe, not so much of the technical achievement or apparent stamina of John Lee so much as the overall over-the-top ridiculousness of the final effect.

I have to wonder, though, if people for whom this audio edition is their first read through of 2666 even notice this bit? Does it even register as a pages-long sentence if prior meta-knowledge hasn't prepared one for such a sentence? Or does it just flit by with the rest of the narration? Let me know in the comments if you are such a one.

Anyway... back to the text.

I'm a very different person in 2021 than I was in 2008-ish. Back then I identified, of course, with Liz, though only sort of in that she's the token girl. I dreamed of someday being something like her, though I never have made it to visit even one bit of Europe, let alone all of them. I've had overlapping lovers who were also friends, etc. etc. I'm a book nerd who's shy on academic credentials (much is made of how Liz is the only one of the Critics who isn't a full professor, hasn't written a dissertation or earned a PhD yet. Eyeroll). I've been the trained attack poodle who eviscerated a verbal opponent on my hind legs whom my peers praised more for doing it at all than for how well I did it. I've definitely had my bona fides to participate in a conversation evaluated on my fuckability instead of my actual qualifications. Etc.

But now I'm partially disabled, and so my focus has shifted irrevocably to Morini, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair (not due to the disease so much as a result of a car accident that took place prior to the events of the novel)  and seems rather an asexual ascetic of a person in contrast to the sexcapades of his friends. My disability antenna vibrate hard in every scene that includes him; I find quickly that he doesn't have an electric wheelchair, for instance -- his friends are often depicted as pushing him around places -- but he gets around almost miraculously well on his own, never encountering accessibility issues and, to my constant awe, never experiencing hand cramps or anything like the agonies I've experienced the few times I've had to use a manual wheelchair.* But presumably 1) His hands and arms are not messed up like mine are and are indoubtedly in better "shape" from doing this activity all the time and 2) Doing it all the time has given him callouses and whatnot that I lack. 

Also, his condition is deteriorating and he is frequently ailing when the other three call him on the phone**, but apart from the perfunctory half-acknowledgment whenever he honestly answers their automatic "how are you"s, the other three aren't terribly interested in how he actually is and rush to dump their latest findings about Archimboldi, literary gossip, and gossip about each other into his increasingly frail lap. Ha and also rumph. And perhaps emblematically and standing in for all three for a moment when it happens, Liz doesn't even see Morini as a man (even as a whole 'nother person, perhaps?) until a hypnagogic episode late in the story has her thinking she saw him standing in a corridor, some distance away from his chair.

Of course, to a degree Morini is partially responsible for this, as when he is temporarily struck blind for a bit but doesn't tell anyone...

He also winds up being left behind when Pelletier, Espinoza and Norton decide to hare off to Mexico to follow up on an account of Archimboldi having surfaced in Mexico City with the intention of proceeding to a fictional town based on Ciudad Juarez, Santa Theresa, on the U.S. border -- where, as Morini discovers in some extracurricular reading, some 100 people have disappeared and been found murdered. The area is home to lots of maquilas (and in the good old 2020s would now, if it actually existed, be a place where a lot of people who came to the U.S. border seeking political asylum get diverted and left in limbo, so it's easy for people to get lost and a prime hunting ground for, that's right, a serial killer. Or maybe more than one? There are over 100 victims).

(A lot more)

Nor is this the only hint of foreboding we get before the Mexico trip. On the ramp-up to this jaunt, we've had some shocking developments, including the appearance of possible additional rivals for Norton's affections in the persons of her brutish ex-husband and of of a much younger secondary school teacher and it is perhaps partly these that trigger a suprising burst of violence on the part of Pelletier and Espinoza, not against the husband or the teacher, but against a cab driver with whom they have what seems like a small disagreement but then it spirals wildly out of control until the cab driver crudely insults Norton. The critics demand he stop the cab, and when he demands payment, Pelletier and Espinoza deliver a playground beatdown that goes way too far. This sours the friends' relationships for quite some time, to the point where later on Morini up and disappears from the hotel they're all staying at for yet another conference, and stays incommunicado for several days and isn't terribly interested in telling everybody how he spent his time.

And then there's one Edwin Johns. On an earlier London trip, the group visited an art gallery whereat this very unusual artist had a show. His art is plenty interesting in its own right, but then the last piece turns out to be arresting as hell, "an ellipsis of self-portraits" containing at its center a mummified human hand. It turns out to be Johns' human hand, the one with which he paints. He cut it off deliberately, took it to a taxidermist to be preserved, and incorporated it into that work. Johns, becomes a secondary object of the Critics' fascination because of course he does (a factor in "The Part About the Critics" is that sooner or later all four of them come to realize that there just isn't enough known about Archimboldi to make him a suitable subject for the kind of all-consuming obsession to which they're all longing to surrender; he's never going to be enough by himself), and so we are treated to a side trip when the three male Critics travel to Switzerland pretty much expressly to meet Johns so they can ask him why he did it. They are not satisfied with his answer "To make money" but in this day and age I think this is a perfectly acceptable one. Artists' works get more valuable after they're dead because then there comes to be a finite number of them; the source is for ever gone. Somebody else makes the millions that their work sells for.

How else can a living artist see that kind of financial windfall? Johns has found a way to shut down his art factory forever (unless he trains himself to paint with his other hand, or his left foot or with a paintbrush in his mouth like several disabled artists do, etc) without having to, you know, die. Except maybe he needed to get a bit more famous first...

Anyway, if you can't tell, I'm as interested in Johns as in Archimboldi, and it's driving me crazy that I can't remember if we get more Johns in 2666 or not. Of course, Liz , who missed the trip to Switzerland to meet the man himself, is unaccountably drawn to another -- or possibly the same? -- exhibit when she returns to London after bailing on Pelletier and Espinoza in Mexico, and learns one last bizarre fact about him but... is there more?

But so, "The Part About the Critics" was not my favorite back in the day, and time has only brought me to dislike the titular critics more (while leaving my love for Casaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo largely intact). I'm ready to move on and spend some time with poor Amalfitano, who is one of the many people the critics have snubbed, taken for granted, and regarded as in every way lesser than, even though he, unlike they, has actually lived a life. And had a wife. And raised a child, as we'll see pretty soon in "The Part About Amalfitano."

Stay tuned, true believers.

*I've only had to do this so far when I'm required to be in constant motion around a large space like when I'm running an event, or when I'm shopping in a large store with brutal concrete floors that doesn't have motorized carts for the handicapped; otherwise I do all right with a cane. So far. Thank goodness for my rheumatologist and my Humira prescription.

**Which they do with incredible frequency. In the days when this was still a land-line-only proposition. Presumably with long distance charges for international calls. Yet blithely they phone around even more profligately than they hop plains to go to symposia or just to visit each other. And not all of them are Baby Boomers so this is all weird and unlrelateable but hey, one of the reasons I read so much is so I can experience as many other lives as possible in the short span of my own. Especially since my physical space is so restricted now.