Virginie Despentes in search of reconciliation, with “Dear asshole”, her luminous new novel
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The title slaps, it’s made for. Dear asshole… The expression will perhaps join “obscure clarity” and “deafening silence” among the famous examples illustrating what an oxymoron is, this “figure of speech combining two words with apparently contradictory meanings” (Larousse). Contradictions, Virginie Despentes has a taste for them as much as for swearing, each and every one nourishing her books, feeding their formidable vitality. The purity of language does not interest her any more than that of human beings: contrary to what her image of radicality might suggest, the author ofapocalypse baby (Grasset, Prix Renaudot 2010) never ceases, from one novel to another, to bring to light the ambivalences of its characters, the proximity in each of apparently antithetical affects and aspirations and to look into what can link individuals who are almost completely opposed.
It was, in a sense, the very heart of the trilogy Vernon Subutex (Grasset, 2015-2017), this serial novel slipping alongside twenty-six characters, exposing their stories and their reasons, bringing them close even when they seemed indefensible – with the exception of the demonic producer Laurent Dopalet. The three volumes, offering a remarkable panorama of contemporary France and the brutality (economic, social, political) of the time, had won a striking success, sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies, adapted in series by Canal+, at the theater by Thomas Ostermeier… What to write after such a saga and such a triumph?
Less ambitious than the previous sum, here is Dear assholethe post-#metoo novel that its readers were waiting for with all the more frenzy as Despentes is both a notoriously (an adverb that she takes) sharp look at her time and the most listened to feminist voice in France by several generations since the manifesto King Kong Theory (Grasset, 2006).
three characters
The eponymous “dear asshole” is Oscar Jayack, a writer in his forties. After he posted a derogatory publication on a social network with regard to an actress, Rebecca Latté, the latter wrote to him to insult him in turn (“You’re like a pigeon who shit on my shoulder. It’s messy, and very unpleasant. »). He flattens himself in apologies while revealing to her that they once knew each other in Nancy, when Rebecca hung out with Oscar’s older sister.
Bon an mal an begins a correspondence between the (relatively) successful author, who “metooized” by a woman he thought he was courting ten years earlier when he harassed her, and the fifty-something, less and less sought after by the cinema (“Do you want to know what it’s like to get canceled?” Talk to an actress my age. »). A third voice is heard, with less regularity than the first two, that of Oscar’s accuser, Zoé Katana, who keeps a very popular feminist blog.
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