Dear Dickhead... and Annihilation
Dear Dickhead... and Annihilation
Reading new novels by Despentes and Houellebecq, and a book on Catullus
First up, I’ve got a short story in Hellarkey III, the third annual Halloween zine from Malarkey Books. I’m proud of this one and I hope you’ll consider checking it out. My story is about a guy who gets worked to death and then some. The zine is five American dollars plus shipping. Malarkey is one my favourite publishers around, and it’s been a thrill and a privilege to get to contribute to the zine two years in a row.
I’ve also got a review of Ariel Gordon’s book of essays Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest at The Temz /tƐmz/ Review. My favourite essay is the one where the author works in Winnipeg’s mushroom factory, a place I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. A bunch of Winnipeg friends and readers have told me about the, uh, distinct smell of that neighbourhood, where a lot of agricultural industry takes place. Gordon touches upon it in the book, but I didn’t realize it was such a big part of Winnipeg’s lore. Part of what makes the mushroom factory so enchanting is that inside it apparently actually smells of peat and moss.
Also, someone noticed this and sent it to me, it looks like the newsletter for the CBC Short Story Prize used my writing tip in a letter earlier this month (I didn’t realize they put out a newsletter, and only subscribed yesterday). I wrote the tip last year as part of the profile they did for each of the longlisted writers. Which reminds me: you should consider entering the CBC Short Story Prize. Getting longlisted last year was a huge ego boost, and if I can do it I’m sure you can, too. The prize closes to submissions at the end of the month. There’s also a non-fiction prize which opens in (I think) in January, and a poetry prize which opens to submissions in the spring.
I’ve been reading the new Houellebecq novel, Annihilation. I’m only about halfway through, so I’ll reserve my final judgement for now, but so far I find it’s a bit of a letdown. It’s a weird break from an otherwise very consistent oeuvre. For one thing, it follows multiple characters. Most of the time there's only one protagonist (two in the case of The Elementary Particles, and the past-present-future/cloning thing in The Possibility of an Island). Here, Paul Raison is our protagonist, loyal steward of the French finance minister heading into the 2027 election. But we also follow, among others, Bastien Doutremont, a hacker-turned-contractor for the DGSI, and Paul’s brother, an art restorer trapped in a marriage so bad only Houellebecq could have invented it. The Raison family (which also includes, their sister Cécile and her unemployed husband Hervé) reunite to care for their father after he is incapacitated by a stroke. The father, a retired DGSI officer, might hold the clue to a series of terrorism and cyberattacks that have threatened Paul’s minister, burned down a sperm bank, and destroyed a cargo ship. Unfortunately, he’s only able to communicate by blinking.
We’re not a million miles away from standard Houellebecq territory here. What’s really new is the sentimentality Houellebecq deploys. The gender war is still ever-present, but time away from work allows Paul Raison to reconcile with his wife, and allows the brother to begin a new relationship with an African migrant who cares for their father. It almost leaves me tempted to think that Houellebecq has found happiness in his recent marriage, despite the Dutch porno scandal he got involved in. But Houellebecq’s sentimentality has its sly side, too. Cécile and Hervé form the only happily married couple in the book, sharing a domestic bliss the others seem to aspire to, but Hervé was a member of the far right Identitarian Bloc, while Cécile’s Catholicism seems to have led her at some point to work with Civitas, an equally repugnant group. So at the very least it's sentimentality as provocation.
As I left off my reading today, the Raison family has carried out a kind of strange, low stakes heist, bringing their father home from his care facility despite the rules and regulations. This is done with the help of some far right activists whose mission is to liberate old folks from the degradations of old folks homes and the like (notably not something a far right group has ever shown interest in). Hervè’s contacts wipe out the CCTV footage to destroy evidence of their raid, but it's never clear that anyone is forcing the father to stay in the facility. Houellebecq is usually pretty good at giving a fair representation of the workings of the system he is attacking, and god knows the state’s rollout of legalized euthanasia is in dire need of attacking, but here things are a bit muddled. There is, however, a very funny speech where a guy inverts the logic of “children are the future" sentiments, arguing this kind of logic is the nihilism produced by the industrialized world.
I’ve read Virginie Despentes’ new book recently, too. It’s called Dear Dickhead. It’s an epistolary novel consisting of emails exchanged between an actress named Rebecca Latté and a novelist named Oskar. He starts off by insulting her appearance in an instagram comment, and before long they have an actual correspondence going. Turns out they know each other: as children Rebecca used to hang out with his punk lesbian sister. Oskar is being #metooed for harassing an intern, Rebecca coaches him through it (Despentes is a French feminist, her views on #metoo exist somewhere between nuanced and contrarian, depending on your point of view). He joins a twelve step program to quit drugs, Rebecca keeps using but then quits too. Then covid hits and turns their world upside down. It’s not much for plot, but who cares?
Houellebecq has a line somewhere that the one thing literature holds over other arts is that only literature:
can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know.
That’s why I read Despentes. She has this great voice that can be, especially in her early work, very punk rock (if you think I’m kidding, she directed an adaptation of her novel Baise-Moi, and it was the first movie to be banned in France in twenty-five years). She’s calmed down a bit in recent years (who wouldn’t?) and a #metoo plotline is really just letting her work on autopilot, but I was mostly okay with that. For Houellebecq and Despentes both, what I like best is seeing them assess the modern world and seeing them come up with aphorisms and pithy, contrarian takes.
If you're looking to get into Houellebecq or Despentes, I recommend starting with The Map and the Territory or The Possibility of an Island for Houellebecq, and Apocalypse Baby the Vernon Subutex trilogy for Despentes.
I’ve also been meaning to mention another good book I read recently. Catullus' Bedspread: The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet by Daisy Dunn. That subtitle is a bit misleading. I think it’s designed to trick people into thinking he was, like, a smutty writer or something. Yes, his main subject was often eros, but the infamously dirty bits of his poems are lines where he's attacking his critics. (You’re probably familiar with Catullus 16 , which goes “I will sodomize you and face-fuck you,/bottom Aurelius and catamite Furius,” but Catullus 97 is even harsher and more vulgar.) Anyway, the book does a great job of laying out what we know of the life and times of Catullus and putting it all into context. I highly recommend this one. And so does Boris Johnson, of all people, who offered a blurb for the cover.
After Boris and Houellebecq, I think maybe I’m due for something from Verso. Maybe the new Vigdis Hjorth? Taking recommendation in the comments.
This has been Adam’s Notes for October 10, 2024. Here’s another link to the Hellarkey zine.
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I’m so glad that someone else was disappointed in Annihilation, I really thought I was the only one that hated it