Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (review)

In this splendidly well-informed, thought-provoking, and readable book, Warren Motte continues the exploration of the (post)modern French novel that he undertook in such exemplary works as Play-texts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature, and Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990. Focusing on "extremely contemporary" texts, on fiction produced "now" (in the past five or ten years), and, in particular, on eight writers who ask themselves and their readers to rethink the possibilities of the novel, Motte not only illuminates their work but also demonstrates the vitality of French fiction in the twenty-first century.

After an introduction in which he argues convincingly that, far from being dead or moribund, the French novel can boast remarkable vigor and constitutes a significant mode of cultural expression, Motte devotes a chapter to each of the writers selected and—except in the case of Lydie Salvayre, most of whose fiction he discusses—concentrates on one of their twenty-first century texts. Some of the writers (e.g. Jean Echenoz or Marie Redonnet) are already well known. Others are less established (I don't think that Patrick Lapeyre is mentioned in the 2008 edition of Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier's La Littérature française au présent, for example). They are all productive: Marie Redonnet and Lydie Salvayre each have more than a dozen books to their credit; Jean Echenoz, Christian Gailly, and Christine Montalbetti a dozen; Gérard Gavarry, Hélène Lenoir, and Patrick Lapeyre at least half a dozen. They are also remarkably diverse, like the novels examined by Motte. Redonnet's Diego, for instance, chooses as protagonist an illegal immigrant trying to navigate a hostile contemporary France. Gavarry's Hop là! un deux trois transports the story of Judith and Holofernes to the banlieue and rewrites it in three different ways. Montalbetti's Western presents a most taciturn cowboy and tells a paradoxically actionless story. In Le Répit, Lenoir examines a pathologically tortured consciousness. As for Salvayre, much of her production (e.g. La Médaille, Les Belles Ames, La Compagnie des spectres) is engagé and denounces social or political crimes and abuses.

Regardless of their visibility, productivity, thematic predilections (marginality and hospitality in Redonnet's Diego, say, differences between the real and the ideal in Gailly's Un Soir au club, the plight of the banlieue in Hop là! un deux trois), or technical preferences (the use of misdirection in Echenoz's Au piano, the iterations of Lapeyre's L'Homme-soeur, the jazzy temporality of Un Soir au club), all the writers studied produce reflective as well as reflexive fiction and ponder its metafictional or metaliterary dimension. Just as he excels at characterizing the thematic thrust of the novels considered and at uncovering correspondences between theme and technique, content and form, the what and the way (the internal focalization and free indirect discourse of Le Répit conforming to the claustrophobic subjectivity analyzed in the novel, for example, and the repetitions in L'Hommesoeur doubling the compulsiveness of the protagonist's behavior), Motte excels at showing how his corpus constitutes a primer on the novel, its governing processes, and its potential. With his customary lucidity and critical tact, he demonstrates how Au piano, for instance, is a fiction of fiction, how Western studies the conflicting aspirations of story and discourse, how L'Homme-sœur represents a questioning of narrative logic, and, more generally, how the novels discussed offer portraits of the artist, foreground interactions with readers, multiply mirroring effects, and meditate upon the nature of literature.

It is the expert conjugation of this contemplative literariness and undeniable sociocultural concerns that, according to Motte, perhaps best characterizes the twenty-first century French novel. Fiction Now is expert too. Indeed, it is outstanding.