30 The New York Review
*One falls all too easily into Garnier’s
apocalyptic style.[what can they be like?], books for
adults, books labelled as noir or white,
whatever—I’ve never been interested
in that particular apartheid.”
Over the past decade and a half the
London-based publisher Gallic Books
has brought out ten of Garnier’s novels
in fine, pithy English versions by a de-
voted trio of translators: Jane Aitken,
Emily Boyce, and Melanie Florence.
The individual volumes have now been
collected into three plump paperback
editions, under the general title Gallic
Noir. Meanwhile, his penultimate book,
the novella C’est la Vie, has recently
been translated, while A Long Way
Off, the last book he completed before
his death from pancreatic cancer, will
appear in English at the end of March.
One of the difficulties of writing
about this master romancier is that it
is impossible to give an account of his
books in any sensible way—in any way
at all, really—without revealing the
plots. This is true of any mystery yarn,
no matter how wooden its characters
or preposterous its dénouement. In
this regard one fondly recalls Edmund
Wilson’s dismissive 1944 New Yorker
piece, “Why Do People Read Detec-
tive Fiction?,” which landed on Agatha
Christie’s reputation, and the reputa-
tions of many others, like the sole of a
size eleven Florsheim shoe squashing
a delicately assembled and intricately
camouflaged English spider, to the
loudly expressed fury of a great many
dedicated arachnologists. “Mrs. Chris-
tie,” Wilson wrote, “in proportion as
she is more expert and concentrates
more narrowly on the puzzle, has to
eliminate human interest completely,
or, rather, fill in the picture with what
seems to me a distasteful parody of it.”
Yet the fact is, for most mystery-
writers, or at least for the best ones—and
Agatha Christie, despite her popularity,
was distinctly not one of those—the plot
is mere cumber, the crossword-puzzle
solution that must be tacked on at the
end of the book if letters of complaint
are to be avoided. One sees this effect
even in Simenon’s Maigret books, so
many of which collect themselves hur-
riedly in the final twenty pages or so
in order to tie up all the flapping loose
ends and tell us whodunnit.
E. M. Forster famously lamented
that a novel must, alas, have a plot.
But why should it? Life, as a moment’s
reflection will show, does not have a
plot or anything like it. We do not re-
member our birth—although Beckett
claimed he could—and will not experi-
ence our death, since, as Wittgenstein
pointed out, death cannot be consid-
ered an event in life. All we have, then,
is the confusion and mess of the stuff
in the middle. This is one of the rea-
sons why we like to curl up of a dark
and stormy night with a good murder
mystery—outdoors the gale is howl-
ing in the trees and the rain is pelt-
ing on the pavement, but in here all is
comfy and warm. Crime fiction, even
of the most sanguinary sort, offers that
yearningly sought-after state of being
cozy—the Danes have a special, ono-
matopoeic word for it, hygge—and a
reassuringly ridiculous plot is a prime
component of the slippers-and-log-
fire experience. Plot, or perhaps we
should say story, gives the illusion of
making sense of a senseless world; it
also gives an impression of continuity,
which the reader unconsciously sets
against the fact of mortality. Paradox-
ically, in the traditional crime novel, no
one actually dies, since, à la Christie,
no one was actually alive in the first
place. This is why critics such as Wilson
deplore crime fiction: Emma Bovary
lives palpably in our imaginations,
and therefore can die, and wrings our
hearts by doing so.
Garnier’s narratives are skillfully
wrought, but his plots don’t feel like
plots; they don’t coax and coerce,
they don’t produce lifeless rabbits out
of trick top hats, and Professor Plum
doesn’t do it with a length of lead pipe
in the library. What plays out in Gar-
nier’s books feels as inevitable and
hideously plausible, and as bleakly,
tragically funny, as the calamities that
befall all of us at one time or another,
when we are sitting at our firesides with
a book in our lap, as it might be, or sim-
ply when, as Auden would have it, we
are “just walking dully along.” In Gar-
nier’s version of life as we live it, rather
than as thriller writers imagine it, the
happier things are at first, the sadder
we know they are going to be in the end.
Besides, the condition of living is noth-
ing to write home about. A character
in one of the novels remarks that “life
leaves no survivors,” and a character in
another one can only agree, with added
vehemence: “Life is like this fucking
minefield. No one gets out alive.”For a typical and shamefully thrilling
example of how all things tend to come
badly unstuck, consider Too Close to
the Edge. In the opening paragraph a
no longer young but still lively widow,
Éliette, is preparing “her first vegetable
jardinière of the season”—a list of the
ingredients is supplied—when she sud-
denly realizes that something has hap-
pened to her, that a momentous change
has come about:As the peeled potato fell into the
pan of water, it made a loud plop
which rebounded off the kitchen
walls like a tennis ball. Holding
the peeler still in her hand, Éliette
paused to savour the moment;
this—she was certain—was pure
happiness.Newcomers to Garnier may snuggle
back with a contentedly expectant
smile; old hands will grimace, in the
way that one would when, say, a tod-
dler on her tricycle shoots blithely out
of a suburban side street and a ten-ton
truck with its heart-attacked driver
slumped over the steering wheel comes
skidding with a scream of tormented
tires across six lanes of freeway.*
The world according to Garnier, as
he never ceases to demonstrate to us, is
at once perplexing, hazardous, irritat-
ing, and absurd, an abode wholly un-
accommodating to human beings, and
the appurtenances of which are bent
on foiling, maiming, and ultimately
exterminating as many of us pests as
it can, by the most cruel and humiliat-
ing means at its disposal. Thus by the
end of the aptly titled Too Close to the
Edge, Éliette finds herself tottering on
the brink of a foul and enormous gar-
bage pit witnessing the inadvertent de-
mise of her recently acquired lover:He leaned against the car and it
started to wobble. As it began to
tip, a gust of wind slammed thedoor closed, trapping Étienne’s
jacket. It happened before Éliette
could even cry out. She heard the
sound of crumpling metal as the
car fell apart thirty metres below,
and the thwack of the gulls’ wings
as they scattered, screeching off
into the white sky. And then noth-
ing but tumbling rubbish.If in Garnier’s world things come un-
stuck with awful inevitability, one of
the pleasures of his work is the way
in which he portrays the descent into
confusion, violence, and simple messi-
ness by way of almost mathematically
precise means. Here again he shows
himself to be a true artist, illustrating
the anarchic nature of human affairs
through craftily concealed artifice.
Things fall apart, but the pieces of the
kaleidoscope are not only beautifully
tinted, they are also strictly contained
at the end of the tube.At the risk of spoiling the reader’s
sport, let us examine in some detail
the latest single volume published in
English. C’est la Vie is short—just over
a hundred pages—and not as densely
elaborated as How’s the Pain?, for ex-
ample, or the blood-boltered and ago-
nizingly hilarious Moon in a Dead Eye,
in the latter of which, not incidentally,
Garnier exacts gleeful revenge on some
examples of the petit-bourgeoisie of
the 14th arrondissement in their golden
years of rural retirement.
As the narrative of C’est la Vie opens,
the protagonist—if any of Garnier’s
characters can aspire to be anything so
grand- sounding—is out shopping with
his grown son and buying him a pair of
sneakers that are way beyond his means.
Jean-François, the father, known as Jeff,
already has an edgy relationship with
young Damien—“All we had in com-
mon was a surname, Colombier, and
a handful of memories as faded as his
jeans”—and as the story goes along
that edge will be honed to a sharp-
ness capable of cutting to the bone. For
Damien, as we shall learn, is having
an affair with Jeff’s former lover Hé-
lène; he is also living off Jeff’s monthly
checks, while dealing drugs on the side.
All the same, he is an amiable chap and
ready to forgive his father most things,
even the faintly incestuous fact of Hé-
lène having once been his girl.
Jeff is a chronically unsuccessful
novelist, until one day, to his own and
everyone else’s amazement, he wins a
great literary prize. “I was suddenly
rich and famous. From that point on,
I would have no right to complain”—
which, of course, does not mean he will
stop complaining. Jeff’s tone through-
out strikes the same note as that of so
many of Garnier’s first-person narra-
tors, and indeed of his third-person
narration: by turns jaded and desper-
ate, and always disenchanted. And no
sooner has Jeff made it big than he
turns his back on the world of fame
and fortune and goes tootling off with
Damien on a faux-youthful adventure
involving... drugs, sex, and rock and
roll. In a highway service station he
meets “a midget with arms so short
they called to mind the tips of chicken
wings,” a garrulous and self-assured
thalidomide victim named Gilbert Bil-
lot, who claims to be a lawyer.
Later, after some mishaps at a party
Damien had taken him to, Jeff lands—
thanks to a lanky and seductivelywicked girl named Agathe, who steals
his wallet, among other things—in a
predicament that urgently requires
Monsieur Billot’s services. This leads to
one of Garnier’s most outrageous and
appallingly funny set-pieces. In Billot’s
apartment, Jeff is pounced upon out of
nowhere by Billot’s aged, dotty mother,
brandishing a pistol. She believes Jeff
has been hired by her son to murder
her, but nevertheless makes him dance
with her to a scratchy recording of
“Roses of Picardy.” The gun goes off
and a bullet pierces a portrait of Billot’s
father through the left eye. Then Billot
himself arrives, and Jeff, having got
hold of the gun, accidentally shoots him
through the eye—the left one—before
fleeing the scene and suffering some kind
of collapse that leaves him hospitalized.
As Jeff remarks, “It is life that is the
danger.”
In the hospital, he pretends to be in
a coma, as a way of staving off the mo-
ment when he will be taken into cus-
tody and tried for murder. People come
to see him—“That’s how it was. I was
visited, like a haunted castle”—includ-
ing the young, beautiful, aristocratic,
and fabulously rich wife whom he had
abandoned on a whim at the start of his
misadventures; there is also Damien,
and Agathe, the wild young woman in
whose company he had left Damien’s
party and gone on the lam. Agathe re-
turns the wallet she stole from him the
night before and, much more profitably,
informs him that after Billot’s death his
mother retrieved the gun and shot her-
self, leading the police to assume that
it was she who murdered her son and
then ended her own life out of remorse.
Jeff is free! He is, as Agathe has it,
“pure as the driven snow.”
Garnier could never have been the
artist that Simenon was, even at the lat-
ter’s most hasty and slapdash. Yet he is
his own kind of genius. Wonderful one-
liners abound—“There were no stars in
life, only walk-on actors”; “Jeanne was
always on time but since he was always
early, it was as if she was always late”;
“Nature was mysterious, incompre-
hensible, impenetrable, off limits, like
the ladies’ toilets”; mothers “are the
first women we kick in the stomach”—
and here and there, seemingly almost
despite himself, he writes with the
mischievous elegance of one of early
Nabokov’s jester-narrators: “A gust of
wind took advantage of Blanche’s exit
to rush into the house and have a look
around, ruffling a napkin, a newspaper,
a fluff ball and the cat’s whiskers as it
went by, before it disappeared up the
chimney, sniggering.”
In Garnier’s vision of “how things
are,” there is no redemption, since the
Fall of Man never happened, man hav-
ing been fallen from the start, in a time-
less state of disgrace. At the druggy
party Damien brings him to, Jeff con-
templates a group of night clubbers pa-
rading past him:Nothing has changed since the
dawn of time. Since the Lascaux
caves. As soon as night falls we
still gather together around any
vague light, drowning our sorrows
in primitive music and intoxicating
substances. Man may have learnt
how to fly beyond the stars, to walk
on the moon, to gorge on the Milky
Way, but he still returns to his cave,
the fear of the bear deep inside him.C’est la vie. Q