The Elegant Variation

TEV GUEST REVIEW: JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT’S MONSIEUR

Monsieur
By Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Translated by John Lambert
102 pp
$12.95

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

Although June 16 is called Bloomsday after the chief protagonist of James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, you could be forgiven for forgetting about poor old Leopold.

After all, Ulysses’ first hundred pages or so are dominated by Stephen Dedalus, a stretch so stylistically baroque many readers skip ahead to Molly Bloom’s saucy monologue at the end of the book, which most regard as the novel’s most accessible chapter. Then there are those who will tell you that the true central figure of Ulysses is none other than Dublin herself.

Joyce’s chief objective in Ulysses was to create the most complete character in all of literature. Part of the reason why there are so many parallels with Homer’s The Odyssey is because Joyce viewed Odysseus as the man Bloom must surpass if he was to stand the test of time—an Everyman for the ages.

In Monsieur, which was published in French in 1986 and has been brought back into print in English by Dalkey Archive Press, Belgian author Jean-Philippe Toussaint has created an Everyman who is every bit as quirky and compelling as Leopold Bloom—only we know a considerably less about Monsieur than we do about Bloom. Indeed, we don’t even know his name.

Monsieur, we are told, is one of the top Commercial Directors for Fiat France. What that means is irrelevant for what Monsieur does best is escape notice, avoid attention, and work as little as humanly possible. “Monsieur displayed in all things a listless drive.” Ergo Everyman—at least from nine to five.

If Monsieur is invisible at work, he has a knack for getting into trouble once he leaves the office. Scrupulously polite and honest to a fault, Monsieur gets pulled into scenarios he’d rather avoid. He detests confrontations but is blind to the ways he provokes them and Toussaint is remarkably adroit at mining this territory for its comic possibilities.

For instance, when Monsieur moves into a new apartment, he is shanghaied by his neighbor into taking dictation for a treatise on, of all things, mineralology. Initially, Monsieur throws himself into the work so as to be done with it as quickly as possible and the narrative is peppered with the occasional, if not inscrutable, paragraph about geological specimens; but as the project drags on and on, Monsieur’s dictation becomes both stilted and literal:

 The interpretation of Greek terms employed to identify the exterior forms of crystals—yoo-hoo are you listening—is in point of fact easy, if not immediate, and presents no difficulty, even for the layman.

No, no difficulty at all for Monsieur but, like Bartleby before him, he’d prefer not to. For Monsieur the only thing worse than working on the book is the prospect of telling his collaborator that he doesn’t want to do it anymore. So he does the only logical thing: he moves.

Like Monsieur, Toussaint’s prose is confounded with contradictions. The writing is stark but dense, elegant yet strangely choppy. It's almost as if Toussaint doesn't want to provide the reader with an unobstructed view of his subject. Even though Monsieur comes off as hapless, he’s imbued with a weirdly magnetic charm the reader is powerless to resist. We never know what Monsieur wants, but we hope he gets it.

One reason for this is Toussaint’s predilection for quandaries of the quotidian. In the afterward to Television, a book that explores the implications of a writer’s decision to stop watching television, originally published in 1997 and re-released in English (again by Dalkey) in 2004, Warren Mott writes:

The fictional worlds that Jean-Philippe Toussaint creates are pleasantly quirky ones, worlds where hopelessly benighted humans struggle with the small vexations of everyday life and where those struggles, described in lavish (and indeed obsessive) detail, gradually assume the proportions of an epic.

As for the accusation that Toussaint traffics in slow motion slapstick and literary situational comedy, he stands guilty as charged; however, he pulls it off with an economy of language one wouldn’t think possible given the unrelenting banality of his subjects and his stories never fail to surprise. Indeed, after Toussaint the work of other so-called stylists seems predictable, labored, and bare.

Joyce would have bristled at such a comparison, but Bloom would have found in Monsieur a fellow practitioner of the art of avoiding conflict.

 

Katherine Taylor Says Goodbye.

For the second year in a row, as my guest-hosting week approached, I tried to convince myself, blogging can be fun! And then at the end of the week, for the second year in a row, I remember, blogging is best left to the professionals. Also, guest-blogging should probably not be undertaken the same week a paperback is released, as an easily distracted person is off-the-charts distracted, missing everything from appointments to freeway exits, forgetting what day of the week it is, etc etc etc.

Topics not covered: what the year is like after the release of your first novel, paperback vs. hardcover experience, Elaine Dundy, expanding on the "literary community" idea (specifically the depth and support of the literary community in Los Angeles), Skylight Books and their new space (magnificent! congratulations to Kerry Slattery and everyone at Skylight!), how maybe I should get a dog but am probably too irresponsible, Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, and writing the second novel.

A hearty, loud thank you to Mark Sarvas for allowing me to squat here for the week. And thank you to the TEV readers, of course, who read.

The author is deeply grateful.

Acknowledgments.

In Rules, I chose not to include acknowledgments. I find them name-droppy and self-indulgent and obnoxious and distracting from the text and generally disruptive to the whole novel-reading experience. Those you're grateful to should know it without having to flip to the back of your book to make sure. If they don't, the author's problems go far beyond an acknowledgments page. But boy, were some people upset! Really.

So! When Peter Blake, who hosted Tuesday night's lovely party, emailed this morning after seeing the photo of Antoine Wilson and said, "No shoutout to me on your blog! J'accuse!" I knew he was not entirely joking.

Peter Blake is the best! He's Los Angeles's most fabulous host! He has excellent taste in sneakers! He makes funny jokes!

The author is deeply grateful to Peter Blake.

Peter Blake is interviewed here.

When Goodbye Is Not Really Actually Goodbye.

This should be an excellent series. Robert McCrum is a Katherine Taylor favorite.

Booze Round-Up.

This description: "upset stomach, thirst, food aversion, nausea, diarrhea, tremulousness, fatigue...difficulties with attention, concentration, and visual-spatial perception" sounds exactly like falling in love. But it's not. It's a hangover.

Will faking you're a drunk get you elected?

Actually, that's all the booze roundup I have. I meant to find more, but hangovers make you lazy.

Kate Continues To Plug Her Friends. David Francis, Specifically.

David Francis's intimate, horrifying, wonderful The Great Inland Sea is one of my favorite books of the past few years.

His new novel arrives in October.

Katherine Taylor Is Easily Entertained.

I think this is fall down laughing hilarious.

The Katherine Taylor Annual Antoine Wilson post.

On his blog today, Antoine Wilson talks about literary communities and how an extended group of writer friends can have a "somewhat haphazard slow-mo trickle-down long-distance domino-topple influence" on the reading and writing life.

Here is a photo of Antoine at the Rules For Saying Goodbye paperback party the other night:

Wow. That's a big image. Too bad I have no idea how to make it smaller. You will notice that Antoine, in the true spirit of the occasion, has matched his attire to the Rules For Saying Goodbye book cover:

At the end of the evening, all the books provided by the publisher (thanks, Picador!) had vanished, so Antoine took home a bottle of vodka instead. Seriously.

Katherine Taylor Rounds Up!

Here is the best part of blogging: you can do it from bed. Proust would have loved blogging.

(I find blogging the most distracting and work-hampering enterprise since love.)

But who doesn't love a good round-up?!?

In the LA Weekly, the always insightful Marc Weingarten pays tribute to McSweeney's devotion to print media. And by "always insightful," I mean he understood my book.

I liked this Aleksandar Hemon profile, in which he says, "(W)hen I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books. I cannot really describe all the points of continuity from my previous books to this one -- I could, but I don't care to -- it's just one big flow of language for me, and then you parse it and publish it." Have we all always been so keen to categorize, to classify, to box up and imprison text by systematization? Who started that?

Jacob Sullum takes on one of my favorite topics ever: bad words. Creating or perpetrating the naughty myth around a word -- any word -- gives a bad word far too much power, and gives far too much power to people who use offensive words for effect, who otherwise wouldn't know how to use words at all. Right, bitches?

This is an abbreviated roundup because I just remembered I have to go get my raincoat from the dry cleaners.

Last Night.

Here at The Elegant Variation, authors understand the importance of color-coordinating a book cover to match the appropriate liquor sponsor.

I really am going to the library now.