French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century: The Return to the Story (review)

This excellently conceived study pursues the idea of the 'return to the story', a phenomenon that started to feature in French literary debate towards the end of the 1980s but has not yet been the subject of a book-length analysis. Kemp unpacks the term in a concise overview chapter that maps evolutions in French fiction from the high experimentation of the 1970s up to the present day, deftly summarizing major trends and debates and characterizing the critical and creative voices with which they are associated. Continuity is carefully traced between current writers and their forebears, demonstrating that, despite the generalized move away from hermetic experimentalism, many of France's most important twenty-first century writers take both narrative drive and formal experimentation as unquestionably important elements of their writing. This introduction is extremely well pitched: a rewarding, detailed, and clearly focused update for readers who are familiar with the field, it also constitutes an undaunting read for students who are not. The single-chapter case studies that follow explore recent writing by some of the most prominent and prolific writers of 'l'extrême contemporain': Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz, and Patrick Modiano, an astutely selected line-up that embraces considerable diversity. Each chapter situates the writer in general terms then homes in on specific aspects of narrative, producing fine-grained readings of the interconnectedness of story and formal experimentation that are theoretically informed, illuminating, and engagingly written. The chapter on Ernaux explores her subtle attentiveness to temporal perspective, pointing to the meanings generated by her split focus on the time of narrating and the time narrated, and detecting in her work an identity split between the writing and the experiencing self. Quignard's complex, philosophical fiction is analysed through a focus on generic hybridity and on an aesthetic of fragmentation, features that are linked to his concern with the boundaries of order and meaning. Darrieussecq is explored through an intensive focus on her idiosyncratic preoccupation with narrative voice, with consciousness, and with the workings of the mind. Echenoz's playfully self-referential work is approached through analysis of the relationship he strikes up with readers by disrupting expectations of genre and plot. Finally, Modiano is studied through a focus on endings and on the tension at these points in his writing between strategies of narrative closure and of openness. Each chapter makes a persuasive case for the symbiosis of storytelling and experimental narrative form. I have one minor quibble: the editorial decision to translate all quotations into English while hiding away the original French version in the notes at the end of the book may well be an important measure for readers without the requisite language skills, but it short-changes readers who do have them and would like to see this material in French without needing to interrupt their reading. That aside, Kemp's study constitutes a most valuable contribution to our understanding of five major authors, as well as a distinctive addition to contemporary reflections on where French fiction, and the novel in particular, might be heading.