More from the fascinating Best Extracts before the Fact, Jack!, the little collection of the beginning of forthcoming French novels. No, in July, when I bought the book, they were forthcoming; since then they have forthcome.
There is plenty of plain-style prose in today’s French novel, just like in American and English fiction. I mentioned the most extreme example yesterday, but most of the extracts are flat, unadorned, and not too difficult. It was a relief to read a chapter by a writer who wrote complex sentences. It was a relief to read figurative language. I was a little shocked to read excerpt after excerpt with no figurative language at all, aside from that inherent in French, I mean. Nothing is ever like anything else. Everything is merely what it is.
Figurative language is fundamental to my idea of literary writing. It is the way to hack through the gluey tangle of language. If language is inadequate to say what something is, a writer can say what it is like, which is often more precise, not less.
Many of the novels are about somber, difficult subjects. Yann Moix’s Orléans is about child abuse; Jean-Paul Dubois’s Not Everyone Lives in the World in the Same Way and Nathacha Appanah’s The Sky above the Roof (Le Ciel par-dessus le toit, there must be a zippier translation) have characters in prison; Sorj Chalandon’s A Ferocious Joy has a bookstore owner with cancer – an understated style likely suits these subjects more than baroque play with language, fine. But metaphors should be part of how a novelist thinks.
A Badminton Game by Olivier Adam is about a novelist whose last novel did not get reviewed or sell well. For this, there is no excuse. Why are people still writing these? The introduction says that “the defense of a refugee agency” is also part of the novel, and that Adam “sculpts a work mixing realism, politics, and sociology” (35). So dump the novelist character.
I have no doubt that this novel, at some point after the self-pitying first chapter, is terrific. That all of these novels, after the first chapter, are outstanding.
Cécile Coulon writes good French prose and uses metaphorical language in A Beast in Paradise. “When she moved among the farmhands, her complexion pink and fresh, smiling at one and all like a Madonna distributing her blessings, the overseer had a bad feeling” (81). The woman here, is the farm’s teenage heiress; she and her boyfriend have just had sex for the first time, scheduling the event during the farm’s hog slaughtering, when they knew everyone else would be occupied. Some kind of irony there. The name of the farm is Paradise, which is also irony, the kind known as “laying it on thick.” There have always been Starkadders in Paradise. The author is twenty-nine years-old and this is her seventh novel. Her first was published when she was seventeen. This book has already won a big prize from Le Monde, despite, or because of, the ridiculousness of its first chapter.
The first chapter that most tempted me to read the rest of the novel was Guillaume Lavenant’s The Nanny Protocol, where the text is a set of branching instructions for a job applicant. As the absurd detail grows, so does the comedy. Whether the instructions are written by a neurotic employer or an anxious applicant, I have no idea.
She will invite you to sit down. Do it. She will explain to you that her husband etc… And then she will pass a hand through her hair, look at the wall clock, rub her nails against her palm, sniff, raise her eyebrows, etc… You will drink something? Yes, a Schweppes, for example. (86)
Italics and etceteras all mine, the point being that it goes on and on at this level of detail. If you have thought, that New Novel thing the French did, Alain Robbe-Grillet and so on, that all died off in the 1970s, right? Oh no, here is a brand new example, a new New Novel.
The great thing for the French language-learner is that The Nanny Protocol, or at least this bit, is a literary text where almost every verb is in the imperative, conditional, or future tense. So useful to see these textbook creatures in the wild, so to speak. So educational. My fear is that the plot of the novel, if it has one, turns into some kind of dumb thriller. Robbe-Grillet’s novels turned into thrillers, too.
