Virginie Despentes · LRB 17 December 2020

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Vernon Subutex​ is almost fifty, ‘skinny as a rake’ and handsome if you will get previous his furred, yellow enamel. His hair is lengthy and utterly white, however largely nonetheless there. It’s Paris, 2014. Once we meet him within the first quantity of Virginie Despentes’s trilogy, Vernon is about to be kicked out of his residence after shedding his job working a report store referred to as Revolver – a sufferer of Napster. For some time he saved up with the choreography of the French welfare system – making use of for jobs he was too outdated ever to be supplied, doing a ‘work placement’ at a live performance venue – however his advantages had been minimize when he was reported for pointless expenditure: a ticket to see the Stooges. And now Vernon can’t afford something however 5 kg luggage of rice and Rizlas, which he fills with tobacco from butts discovered on the pavement. He ‘fucks much less typically than a married man’ and stops seeing his pals in case they invite him for dinner and he has to purchase wine. He spends all his time on-line, avoiding something ‘about Islam, local weather change, fracking, ill-treated orangutans, about Romanians getting chucked off buses’, which actually solely leaves porn and posting outdated music movies to Fb. It’s there that Vernon learns his outdated good friend Alex Bleach has drowned in a lodge tub.

Alex was a rock star, a ‘twisted, reckless, wounded dandy’. Fame had been like ‘stepping right into a blazing oven’, till the gasoline went out within the late Nineties and solely medicine might hold him going. When Alex wished to really feel like a traditional middle-aged man, he would go to Vernon at his residence to hearken to outdated information and discuss his experiments with binaural beats, ‘sound waves that had been speculated to have a profound impression on the unconscious’. When Vernon obtained behind on his hire, Alex gave him cash. However with Alex lifeless, Vernon is shortly evicted, which units going the scampering plot of the primary quantity: Vernon wants €1000 to get his repossessed belongings out of storage, which he hopes to boost by promoting Alex’s final confession, a coked-up monologue self-recorded onto three videotapes.

Despentes wrote Vernon Subutex virtually in actual time. The primary ebook appeared in France on 7 January 2015 – the day of the Charlie Hebdo shootings – and the third in 2017. The trilogy has been an enormous industrial success and has fortified Despentes’s already inconceivable standing: a former cleaner, porn reviewer, music author and intercourse employee, she barged into fame in 1994 with Baise-moi, a feral, slangy thriller (and later movie) about two girls who go on a intercourse and killing spree after considered one of them is gang-raped. Since then, Despentes’s novels have continued to attract on a physique of ‘low’ tradition (porn, actuality TV, punk rock) not readily assimilated into the rarefied world of French literary fiction, whereas her feminism (pro-sex and shaded by an identitarianism typically thought of a garish American import) is all the time effervescent over into her girls protagonists.

This is the reason Vernon – a placid, affable character, and a person – is a shock. And but Despentes remains to be preoccupied by the identical issues: energy, intercourse, ache, anger, poverty, the violence of the state, the violence of males, violence owed to girls who’ve been raped by males. What’s new is the size: greater than forty named characters get drawn into Vernon’s orbit and Despentes enters and exits their heads utilizing shut third-person narration, typically switching focus a number of occasions in a single chapter. The plot dilates and dilates to introduce totally different ‘sorts’ of latest Parisian: a trans e-cigarette salesman, a far-right moped courier, a secondary college trainer who will get fired and begins gathering plastic luggage. All of them drink an excessive amount of and use medicine (not in a enjoyable method). They’re both undersexed or adulterous. They’re racist in differing concentrations, however united of their cynicism, which Despentes attributes to socioeconomic circumstance and an excessive amount of social media. Reviewers wish to say that the trilogy ‘holds a mirror up’ to French society and name it issues like ‘the Comédie humaine 2.0’. However Balzac wrote about trendy Paris as upwardly cellular – the arriviste professionals, jolly artisans and virtuous younger upstarts in a position to accumulate capital unchecked – whereas Despentes is worried with the other: the Gen X losers (and ‘looseuses’) whose horizon of changing into is both slim or inexistent.

Homelessness forces Vernon to maneuver across the metropolis, staying with pals and acquaintances. Xavier, a good friend of Vernon’s since college, is a ‘right-wing cunt’ who has Vernon dog-sit for a number of days. Xavier wrote a profitable screenplay within the Eighties however has been ‘bunged up’ ever since, supported by his spouse, who does advertising and marketing for an e-commerce platform. He’s engaged on a biopic of Drieu la Rochelle (‘now that it’s OK for individuals to be on the far proper’), and on the grocery store he fantasises about kicking a lady in a hijab: ‘It’s psychological warfare: they do it intentionally to make the French male realise how devalued he’s.’ Patrice, however, is extra of a left-wing cunt. He lives in a council flat within the suburb of Corbeil and lets Vernon keep as a result of he is aware of what it’s wish to be homeless (although Vernon pretends to not be). Patrice used to play bass in Alex’s band and has a masters diploma in English. Now he listens to Duke Ellington and works sorting submit on a short lived contract. He wears a silver bangle and needs to see Jean-Luc Mélenchon in energy. He persuades himself that the one purpose he used to beat up his ex-wife is that he’s all the time been poor.

The ladies characters rant too, about Gérard Depardieu’s tax evasion, concerning the embarrassment of getting a boyfriend who’s a tradition author for Libération, about – quelle shock! – the carrying of the veil. They’re additionally the sorts of lady for whom Despentes has all the time written, as she explains in a now infamous passage from King Kong Principle, her autobiographical feminist manifesto, revealed in 2006:

I write from right here, from the warehouse of unsold girls, the psychos, the skinheads, those that don’t know accessorise, those that are scared they stink, these with rotting enamel, those that don’t have any clue, people who guys don’t make issues straightforward for, those that’d fuck anybody who’s ready to have them, the large sluts, the scrawny skanks, the dried-up cunts.

Sylvie belongs to the warehouse: she’s a Parisian bitch, an ex-girlfriend of Alex, an ex-heroin addict. Nowadays she solely smokes weed which she retains in a heart-shaped field, although it doesn’t appear to relax her out. She hasn’t eaten since she began the menopause and has by no means labored, which turns into an issue when her ex-husband stops paying upkeep for his or her now grown-up son. When she feels jealous of her pals’ happiness, she sleeps with their husbands and spends past her means – underwear from Eres, taxis all over the place. Vernon comes to remain and Sylvie clothes up like a Hitchcock heroine in a black gown and chignon. They’ve intercourse and it’s good – or no less than he makes the suitable strikes and he or she makes the suitable noises. Then Vernon leaves with three Pléiade editions of Marx from her bookshelf, which he sells with out studying.

It seems that lots of people would really like the tapes of Alex’s final confession. Lydia Bazooka, a contract music author, desires the footage for the biography she’s writing of him. She’s a millennial, so Despentes (b. 1961) makes her bulimic and farcically overstimulated by the web: ‘Each paltry “Like” is a pelvic thrust, each remark an orgasm, and each personal message drives her right into a frenzy.’ Laurent Dopalet, a movie producer and ‘tubby little’ Boomer, desires the tapes for shadier causes: he and Alex shared an ex-girlfriend, a porn actress named Vodka Satana, whose suicide might have been one thing extra sinister. Dopalet forces girls (staff, his spouse) to do issues for him and to him as a method of reasserting his virility and waning affect within the movie trade. (This is able to maybe really feel trite if Despentes hadn’t written the books earlier than we knew what Weinstein did to girls.)

Dopalet hires the Hyena, a lesbian personal detective {and professional} troll (she first appeared in an earlier novel, Apocalypse Child), to trace down Vernon, who has gone underground after having run out of Fb contacts and couch beds. He spends his days on the Métro, using backwards and forwards and infrequently swapping trains to ‘throw individuals off the scent’. At night time he involves the floor to sleep in an ATM sales space. After a number of days, he begins to beg and is stunned at how naturally his hand kinds the suitable form and the way little he feels about doing it. ‘It had not been premeditated. He had merely made the gesture … feeling it was not fairly actual.’

Despentes fills her ebook with interval shopper element (pastries are purchased at Sadaharu Aoki, groceries at Tang Frères, every little thing beneath the solar at Tati) and slang (‘les niktamères’, ‘faire du X’, ‘un flingue’). A number of the English substitutes (‘bae’, ‘on fleek’) in Frank Wynne’s translation already really feel dated, although I’m unsure anybody has ever snorted ‘gutter glitter’ or smoked a ‘most cancers stick’, even in Paris six years in the past. However ultimately, this doesn’t actually matter: the second is caught at any time when a personality’s gaze wanders. Then, Despentes’s prose (prolix, frothy, grasping) takes second place to what’s seen: a younger black man, ‘his face deformed by the large cyst on his cheek’, turns a bench at Arts et Métiers station into his residence; on the Porte de Pantin, somewhat boy walks between the automobiles, tapping on their home windows; within the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont ‘a person sitting on the primary bench is consuming a yoghurt and speaking to himself. He’s laughing at one thing, his sneakers are falling aside and hooked up to his ankles with string.’

The Buttes-Chaumont, within the nineteenth arrondissement, isn’t removed from the place Despentes truly lives in Belleville and it’s the place she walks her canine daily. It’s additionally the place a lot of the second quantity is about, as soon as Vernon is found by his pals sleeping in an deserted home, so feverish and unwell he looks like ‘a helium balloon’. Patrice, Lydia and the others supply him a mattress, however he takes up residence with a neighborhood of homeless individuals beneath a railway bridge on the Buttes-Chaumont’s japanese finish as an alternative:

He might now not tolerate partitions and ceilings, he discovered it tough to breathe, each object was hostile, he was suffering from a noxious vibration. The worst factor was having individuals round him. He might really feel their distress, their ache, their worry of not being ok, of being unmasked, being punished, losing their lives: he felt it was like pollen, it insinuated its method into each orifice and made it inconceivable to breathe.

One thing adjustments in Vernon: he adopts a type of radically unattached, post-work outlook, ‘he genuinely doesn’t give a toss.’ He will get maintain of a pair of pink Mexican cowboy boots, which make him really feel good and trigger him to push his hips out when he walks. Immediately, Vernon is like ‘a radiator’ exuding a heat that draws increasingly individuals. His outdated pals go to him within the park daily and hang around with the homeless, creating ‘a combination of group remedy session, al fresco espresso store, beer backyard and debating society’, with Vernon DJing on an outdated iPod and Bluetooth speaker. Everyone seems to be remodeled, not least Vernon, who will get his mojo again after a Bolivian ‘indigenous, lesbian-feminist punk’ offers him a transcendental blowjob throughout which he loses consciousness. When the climate will get colder, they transfer into the Rosa Bonheur, a bar hidden among the many Buttes-Chaumont’s timber, the place they ‘eat and chat shit’. Within the evenings, Vernon performs a set and everybody goes nuts, as in the event that they’re on medicine, besides they aren’t. His tastes are eclectic: The Who, Tom Jones, Prince, Freddie King, Rihanna, P.J. Harvey. ‘The music jolts by way of their bones, shifting their arms, working their hips.’ It’s all very ‘activate, tune in, drop out’, which is to say it’s additionally somewhat clichéd.

The politics of Vernon Subutex are vaguer than in Despentes’s earlier writing. Music is clearly essential: Vernon’s DJ units turn into ‘convergences’ that convey an incongruous group of depressing and immiserated individuals into ‘a single undulating physique’ the place variations of sophistication, opinion and identification fall away, and no person appears to be like at their telephone. Despentes additionally vaguely gestures in the direction of the concept of the park as belonging to nobody and so to everybody, one of many solely websites within the metropolis not but privatised, a commons wherein individuals might be their genuine selves. Despentes made this level extra forcefully in an interview: ‘A park is a spot you’ll be able to hand around in with out paying, the place you must invent what it’s you’ll do there.’ These aren’t new concepts, however their collectivism is wildly totally different from the brute individualism promoted in King Kong Principle, the place intercourse work is a method of ‘dipping into intercourse with out sentiment’, cash is ‘independence’, femininity is ‘bootlicking’, feminism is a ‘query of perspective’ and rape is a ‘civil battle’ that males would lose if girls had been extra violent.

There’s nonetheless rape in Vernon Subutex, as there are girls who need to avenge it. The Hyena, having simply tracked down the tapes in Vernon’s deserted rucksack, decides to double-cross Dopalet and let the Buttes-Chaumont group be taught the reality: that Dopalet was concerned within the homicide of Vodka, having first raped, drugged and pimped her out to his pals for months. No one is especially shocked (‘it’s the human race’), apart from Aïcha, Vodka’s daughter, a ‘strong-minded’ pupil of tax legislation who additionally wears a hijab (towards the desires of her secular, educational father). With the assistance of Céleste, a ballsy younger tattoo artist and waitress, Aïcha decides to destroy Dopalet. The pair begin out small (coughing throughout a lecture given by Dopalet’s son on the Palais de Tokyo) and finish massive (tattooing ‘rapist’ and ‘assassin’ onto Dopalet’s again whereas he’s sure and gagged). They’ve a lot in frequent with Baise-moi’s protagonists, Manu and Nadine, besides that Aïcha and Céleste mess it up: they neglect to disguise themselves and underestimate how lengthy it can take to complete the tattoo. They share not one of the misandric competence of Manu and Nadine: they’re in over their heads, the scene verges on slapstick and the Hyena has to assist them go into hiding. ‘She felt sorry for the ladies, who had been … too inexperienced to know that they might remorse this.’ And so they do remorse it: Aïcha and Céleste are permitted a share of the violence usually directed in the direction of girls, just for it to be later restored to Dopalet in a really brutal and disturbing method.

All of which raises the query: has Virginie Despentes gone tender? Maybe somewhat. Her most up-to-date journalistic interventions – on Roman Polanski and the sexism of the French movie trade; on race and police violence – nonetheless seethe and are written with a rhetorical zip that has seen them usefully appropriated at protests. ‘On se lève et on se casse’ (‘we’re getting up and getting out of right here’) is papered to partitions round Paris, as is ‘Despentes Présidente’. But in interviews Despentes insists she has mellowed; anger was beginning to destroy even the issues she favored.

By the third quantity​ of Vernon Subutex, the characters are equally cured of their disillusion. Vernon has obtained shamanic standing and the group has left Paris to stay off the land. They construct an encampment within the countryside, maintain a giant rave, then transfer on to the following place. Cash, alcohol and the web are forbidden; the group survives off the donations of attendees they usually get jumpy when anybody mentions monetisation. It’s a bit like Burning Man with out costly tickets, or just like the Zones à défendre – the anti-capitalist settlements set as much as hinder new airports, motorways and energy vegetation in rural France – with out the eco-communard ideas. In reality, no person has a clue what occurs on the convergences, besides that it feels good when Vernon performs. He begins mixing Alex’s binaural alpha waves between songs, which produces mass hallucinogenesis within the crowd. ‘A delicate, luminous confusion that makes you need to take time and hold silent. Epidermises lose their boundaries, everyone turns into each physique; it’s a boundless intimacy.’

The promise of a really giant donation quickly breaks up the occasion. Vernon decides to go it alone: he’s had some type of ‘male menopause’ that makes him look extra good-looking than ever – ‘like in the event you spliced Bruno Mars with Keith Richards’. He excursions Belfast, Wolverhampton and Liverpool, however ‘with out the others … he’s just a few man with lots of tunes loaded onto USB drives.’ In Paris, on the night time of 13 November 2015, the group spontaneously reunites, consuming Nutella crêpes as they watch information of the fear assaults roll in. Xavier posts ‘#StopIslam’ to Fb however Despentes doesn’t totally reckon with France’s response aside from to say that individuals had been scared to take the Métro and wore trainers to concert events. She does nonetheless join the trilogy’s last twist to terrorism, although the motivating ideology is a parodic collage of alt-right, jihadist and profiteering sensibilities.

The closing chapter borrows from speculative fiction to think about the world on the ‘twilight of the third millennium’. The seas are poisonous and the air is now not breathable however due to ‘the event of kinesics’ and time journey, individuals are in a position to open up ‘the nice doorways’ and return to a time ‘earlier than the nice catastrophes of the early twenty first century’ the place they will no less than hearken to music and dance. It registers doom but additionally Despentes’s bemusement on the trilogy’s real-life reception. Within the ebook’s future, Vernon is worshipped like a Mayan god and the story of his ‘sect’ is made right into a TV sequence, which is then tailored right into a manga comedian. In actual life, there has already been a TV mini-series: 9 episodes on Canal+ with Romain Duris enjoying Vernon. It’s fairly trustworthy, besides there’s significantly extra lesbian intercourse and all of the characters are too enticing. A graphic novel has additionally simply appeared, illustrated by the cartoonist Luz, finest identified for his Charlie Hebdo covers. But it surely’s on Fb the place life most imitates artwork: Vernon has his personal web page to which followers submit songs they think about he may play: Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’, Cypress Hill’s ‘Hits from the Bong’, the White Stripes’ cowl of ‘Jolene’, the Beatles’ ‘You By no means Give Me Your Cash’.