Pas dupe by Yves Ravey (review)

Salvatore Meyer's wife Tippi has gone over the edge of a cliff in her car, and she has died. Inspector Costa is charged with deciding whether it was an accident or a crime, and he wants answers. An insurance agent named Kowalski wants answers. Bruce Cazale, Tippi's father and Salvatore Meyer's employer, wants answers. Gladys Lamarr, the neighbor, wants answers. We readers want answers, too, for goodness sake. In short, we have a situation here. Yves Ravey has a great deal of experience in creating situations, and the one he imagines here recalls in certain of its aspects others he has proposed in the past: the traffic accident in Bambi Bar (2008) for example, or the family drama in La fille de mon meilleur ami (2014). Since launching his career in the early 1990s, Ravey has established a reputation as a writer who plays on the edges of genre fiction, producing thrillers whose "thrill" resides principally in the way they interrogate the conventions of that form, to the verge of parody. He creates dark worlds leavened by a puckish, refreshing sense of humor, practicing a great deal of narrative legerdemain as he does so. Typically, Ravey wagers heavily upon the hermeneutic code, and Pas dupe is no exception. The novel's first paragraph is a brief one, yet despite its brevity we learn both that Tippi Meyer has died in a car wreck and that she had been conducting a love affair with Kowalski. What better way to whet our appetite for things to come, and to encourage us to anticipate a tale hinging on crime and punishment, those two pillars of narrative interest? It is Salvatore Meyer who tells this story, speaking in the first person. He is devastated by the death of his wife, he remarks: "C'est à elle que je pensais, sans cesse. Car c'est un fait: j'aimais Tippi" (27). We would like to believe him, of course, because we prefer that narrators should tell us the truth. Yet truth is a scarce commodity in this world. Ravey parcels out bits of it very deliberately, in a process that is both droll and engaging. He puts that dynamic on stage and causes it to perform, as it were. It becomes apparent, notably, that any suspicions we may entertain have been largely anticipated (and undoubtedly shaped, in fact) by the man whose job it is to find the truth of this matter. Moreover, Salvatore clearly feels the weight of that quest: "C'était quand même terrible. Avoir quelqu'un comme l'inspecteur Costa sur le dos n'était pas de tout repos" (103). As to being duped, Ravey suggests that some people are more susceptible to that process, while some are more resistant. Other people will recognize that being duped—for a while, at least—is very much part of the fun in certain kinds of texts to which we turn when we seek to inhabit a world that is not, strictly speaking, our own.