The insulting, ironic, but tender character of the new novel by French feminist and punk author Virginie Despentes is perfectly captured in its abrupt title, Cher connard, which can be translated as somewhere between ‘Dear cunt’ and ‘Dear bastard’.
It has become an instant bestseller since its publication in mid-August, and follows her 2015-2017 trilogy Vernon Subutex (published in English by MacLehose Press), which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It comes 28 years after she first arrived, with a wild-child bang, onto the French literary stage with her début novel Baise-moi (Fuck me, published in English by Grove Press).
Cher connard is a feminist book, in the lineage running from her King Kong Theory (published in English by Feminist Press) and up to her fiery op-ed in French daily Libération applauding the dramatic walk-out from France’s 2020 Césars film awards by actress Adèle Haenel in protest at its honouring of Roman Polanski (Haenel’s 2019 interview with Mediapart sparked a movement of revolt against sexual abuse in the French cinema industry).
Despentes, 53, has become the figurehead of a kind of literature that marks itself out as loud-mouthed but which also attracts and reaches a wide public readership. It is because of the promise of proving to be a very popular novel, but fundamentally contemporary, that Cher connard has attracted so much media attention and, already, so many readers. That enthusiasm is easily understandable, at a period in time when French literature has a strong tendency of finding its profits in backward-looking and morose evocations of bygone splendour. Against that backdrop, Cher connard has come crashing onto the scene, full of fighting vigour.
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While there is every reason to believe that Cher connard will be one of the major hits even beyond this end-of-summer-early-autumn literary season in France, the book is not exactly what those familiar with Despentes’ writing might have expected – namely a text brimming with blistering anger, drawing a gun to settle scores all over the place. It’s actually the contrary of that.
It is a sign of the author’s very great class to be able to write about precisely where she is now, and to defend a situated and complex point of view. In face of the crowds of lofty sermonizers who simplify everything, Despentes offers a talent for vulgarisation, for synthesising strong ideas in incisive turns of phrase, and all the while taking consideration of the plurality of our lives, of our stories, of our different ways of viewing the world.
Rather death than do yoga.
The “connard” in the title is a man called Oscar, a name that in French rhymes with his soubriquet (“connard” is pronounced with a silent “d”, and Oscar with a hard “ar”), no accident of course. Oscar is an author, and is denounced on social media by his former press attaché who accuses him of blatant harassment. It is a case of #Metoo in which, as usual, the male in a situation of power is totally incapable of recognising what he made the young woman, who was at his service, endure. But just before the scandal erupted, Oscar had begun corresponding with Rebecca Latté, a cinema star he knew in his younger years, kicking off as an exchange of insults before soon becoming richer in form.
The cover of the book presents Cher Connard as being a modern-day Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses), the 1782 epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (an unsurprising reference for a novel of correspondence). But in reality it is quite the opposite. While the characters in Choderlos de Laclos’s novel deploy nuggets of perversity that drive plots like so many battles in a fight to the death, those of Despentes progressively launch themselves into a generalised mine-clearing operation. This is an operation of pacification, but one that is of course trenchant, grinding, and in which teeth are unhesitatingly bared. One will never find a mollifying incantation to love and harmony in Despentes’ writing; the rage is intact. As Rebecca Latté writes, “rather death than do yoga”.
It’s as if Despentes has adopted a minimal novelistic form – this is an exchange of correspondence between people who never meet face-to-face – which above all allows to open up spaces of reflection, in tiny essays, about what preoccupies her, beginning with patriarchy, as in this extract: “Patriarchy: it’s always a show of vitality and power dominated by an arrangement which protects the murderer and allows the hordes to acclaim him, for the beauty of the ritual. What is celebrated, when one rapes a woman and one rapes her well, is the very essence of patriarchy: to put strength on its knees by imbecilic and morbid techniques.”
But the novel is not abandoned solely to the pleasure of settling scores and which delights only in seeing an adversary knocked to the floor. One recurrent observation in the book is a form of incomprehension at the unreserved aggressivity on social media (“internet, above all, is bile”), an incomprehension which is also expressed in terms of a generational difference.
It’s strange this manner of never hating [those] too high-up.
The young Zoé Katana, Oscar’s former press attaché, becomes placed in the background against the centre-stage correspondence between Oscar and Rebecca Latté. While the latter two characters may conjure up images of some real-life celebrities (one might, for example, imagine Béatrice Dalle as Rebecca), their true role is that of being emanations, more or less distantly, of the author.
And that is where the novel takes an unexpected turn. If Despentes has no hesitation in putting feminist issues back on the table – she always has a good stock of punchlines at hand for those – that is a furrow she has already ploughed. Here she interests herself in the point of view of the attacker, not in order to defend him but simply to understand the mechanics at work. This turnaround is worth it in itself, because a good novel is not a pamphlet but rather the form in which one can head off for adventure and explore those different to oneself.
Nevertheless, the increasing attention given to Oscar, the author held in contempt, and Rebecca, the somewhat faded actress, is not about looking for empathy, but instead about the experience they will have, both at the same time but separately, in coming off addictive substances, whether these be heroin or alcohol. Cher connard talks about getting high, and about detoxification, about the pleasures drugs provide, and how it’s hard to come off them (“I am defective. I am difficult to exploit. I am a bad soldier. Good soldiers take the drugs they are prescribed”).
Cher connard is a tender novel, but not of baby-pink tenderness (the comments on relationships between parents and their offspring are thorny-stingy), and certainly not the kind of tenderness in universal marketing which uses sentimentalism to flog products. Rather, it is a tenderness that doesn’t miss the mark, and which is the counterpart of an anger that doesn’t miss the true enemy, as in this extract: “And I say to myself – it’s strange this manner of never hating [those] too high-up. Just your neighbour, he who you could be. But not those who are really shielded.”
We know very well that to be punk is not a barrier to one being sentimental. But for Despentes, this does not come in flights of oratory; it is structural. It is about paying attention to the other, an attention that is at the very foundation of the composition and plot of the novel, and which gives each character a complexity, avoiding reductive identities. And that is why there is every reason to rejoice that Cher connard reaches its destiny as a bestseller.
It is now decades since Michel Houellebecq first acquired the status of a sort of intellectual guide, with his depressive virility, a product of French literature who was inexplicably made into an export. But whoever wants to seize the present should turn to Despentes. Her school of work makes one more alive, and more intelligent.
*
Cher connard by Virginie Despentes is published in France by Grasset, priced 22 euros.
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- The original French version of this review can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse