The fame of Vernon Subutex is Manchurian. It grinds sausages. It provokes electoral fraud. It plummets to previously unknown depths. The fame of Vernon Subutex far outweighs the content of the novel which bears its name. As though the novel had been written with the clear intention of creating a myth, which it has succeeded in doing. The reality of a myth never lives up to the aura of a myth. Vernon Subutex has whispered sweet nothings to me in Mexican bars, has brutally attacked my long lost enemies on a deserted Moscow street, has hypnotised me into swimming with sharks off the coast of Recife. It, or he, has managed to do all these things without my having needed to read the novel. Having now read the novel, I suspect that I am in danger of trashing the myth.
Because the novel is a picaresque stroll through a post-Houllebecq 21st century Paris which never really hangs together. The novel goes on random digressions, it exploits its two dimensional hero in order to talk about abuse or transsexuality or a hundred and one other things which might concern the characters of a near contemporary Paris but only barely assemble themselves into what we might expect or demand of a novel. But this is where we go wrong. Because Despentes isn’t constructing a novel. She’s constructing a myth.
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