Current French fiction
Anita Brookner
It has to be said that the prizes awarded in the November literary season went to novels that were not of the highest quality. (The same might be said of novels published in the preceding months, with only one or two expections.) The Prix du Roman de l'Academie Frangaise, the first of the prizes to be announced, went to Eric Neuhoff for Un bien fou (Albin Michel). The august jury succumbed to an expert but lightweight account of a love affair poisoned by jealousy, until the hero's dilemma is resolved by the most deadly of stratagems: an itemised description of his rival's physical and moral shortcomings which he publishes to great acclaim. Since his rival is a reclusive elderly novelist, in the mould of J. D. Salinger, the latter's sales and reputation are badly affected, and revenge is experienced as deliverance. Eagerly, even angrily written, Un hien fou contains some grindingly authentic descriptions of outraged feelings on the part of the thwarted lover and maintains its brio until the last page. Admittedly slight, this was the most readable of an exceptionally ponderous selection of novels, none of which rose above a general level of humourlessness and low spirits.
The Prix Femina was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for Rosie Carpe (Minuit), the story of a girl's search for a beloved brother who has disappeared in Guadeloupe. Flashbacks describe their childhood in Brive-laGaillarde, their experiences in Paris, a rape, the birth of a child, and a long journey of discovery which has led certain critics to compare the very young author to Faulkner. In strict contrast to its incantatory style, the wide-eyed simplicity of Le Voyage en France (Gallimad) won the Prix Medicis for its author Benoit Duteurtre. This tells the story of a young American, David, enamoured of the Belle Epoque, and in particular of a painting by Monet, who travels to Paris to find it full of high-rise estates, performance artists, gay seminarists, and born-again Christian pilgrimages sponsored by supermarket chains. David's rather lazy discoveries are interspersed with a first-person narrative in which the author describes his hypochondria, his sexual arrangements, and the various trials he undergoes in search of relief from his anxieties. The two eventually meet up, though their meeting has no observable significance. To David's dismay Hauss
mann's Paris is almost obscured by an ersatz Americanism, so that his return to New York is a return to a form of authenticity. The blandness of the narrative seeks to emulate that of Candide, without, however, the wit to sustain it.
The Prix Goncourt went, as expected, to Jean-Christophe Rufin for Rouge Bresil (Gallimard), a long (550 pages) epic on the theme of the conquest of Brazil by the French in 1555. The interest of the expedition, apart from its colonising intentions, consisted of the fact that two children, Just and Colombe, were taken along to serve as interpreters, on the understanding that children would accommodate themselves more easily to a foreign language than adults. Dispossessed of their home in France the children have no other resource but to go where they are taken, despite the fact that Brazil at that time was given to cannibalism. There is a great deal of local colour (the author, a doctor who has taken part in various humanitarian initiatives, knows the country well), conflict with the Portuguese (who got there first), and a clash between the civilised classical values of 16th-century France and the primitive beliefs of the new territory that the French hoped to gain for the king. All this is worthy and strangely familiar, despite the exotic setting. The familiarity stems from the peculiar flatness of the narrative, so that one can well believe oneself on that three-and-half-month voyage and up against those phenomena of displacement with very little effort or indeed anticipation. The author's admirable credentials force respect, as does the density of the account. What is missing is that touch of individuality that transforms reportage into something singular and persuasive.
The same romantic historicism appealed to the jury of the Prix Renaudot, who awarded their prize to Martine Le Coz for Celeste (Le Rocher), a novel set in Paris in 1832. A cholera epidemic, described in visceral detail, is at its height; a heroic doctor, a mulatto like his friend Alexandre Dumas. cares for the victims in a hands-on manner which few modern doctors would choose to emulate. He falls in love with the 16-yearold Celeste, a niece of the painter Paul Heut. Or rather they fall in love, after a single encounter, in which the doctor's outstanding qualities of honour and dedication are thrown into sharp relief by a setting of disease and ordure. The discrepancy in their ages — she is still a child, while his hair is already grey — is thought to be insignificant, as are the challenges implicit in the disjunction of their appearances. At 16 Celeste, no less saintly than the doctor, has been earmarked as a bride for her uncle, the painter. The times, it seems, were generous with regard to these arrangements. The interest of the novel lies in its feverish descriptions of a city menaced from within. The author, who is interested in painting, has previously written on Turner. Her present novel does not lack for drama (cholera. the abortive revolution of June 1832) and her style rises zestfully to the challenge.
Also noted were La voix d'Aho by Ricard Millet (Gallimard) in which style matched subject; both were exalted and enervating. A viola player and his lover meet every Friday, mainly in order to talk about their respective childhoods, by which both are traumatised. The woman, Nicole, makes no secret of the fact that she intends to commit suicide at the age at which her mother died, and in due course does so. The viola player, on tour, is helpless to prevent this. Strangely, echoes of a traumatic childhood form the subject of LEmpire de la morale (Grasset) by Christophe Donner, which is in the main a disquisition on the evils inherent in the belief systems — or even the theologies — of Freud and Marx. The peg on which this is hung is the fiction of the damage inflicted on a child by a psychoanalyst mother and a communist father. The child is subject to hallucinations, in which a hand (his own) grows until it occupies all the surrounding space. This is the only physical detail in the novel; the rest consists of polemic. So steady and monotonous are the author's diatribes that one tends to overlook the passion of the arguments (Oedipus is innocent?). At the same time he provides little gratification for the reader. Strange to note once again the tenacity of early experience, which subsequent events do little to dispel.
It is pleasant to be able to report that Michel Houellebecq, the poete maudit of the present generation of writers, who failed to make it into any of the lists, has to date sold a quarter of a million copies of his novel Plateforme (Flamrnarion) and looks likely to outsell all the other prizewinners put together. Houellebecq's interests — mainly sexual — are pursued in affectless prose which has struck a chord with the reading public. He is also interested in forms of exploitation, both sexual and financial, and seems to record a disgusted fascination with corrupt and corrupting stratagems. This is infinitely more fascinating than another much trumpeted sexual odyssey, La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (Fiction et Cie) by Catherine Millet, a pedantic account of the author's conduct to date, apparently with no desire to titillate, although Millet's tally of lovers has reached an awesome total even by the most sophisticated standards. These two heroic pioneers, just this side of the Marquis de Sade (although Millet has proved herself a worthy follower), exposed the good manners of the other prizewinners as a somehow inadequate response to the problems of survival in today's world. Both were excluded from the consideration of the bien-pensants, although solitary voices were raised in their favour. Moral censorship of a kind still exists, at least in public. Few would associate their behaviour with that of Houellebecq, still less that of Millet. Their sales, however, are utterly respectable,
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