Envoyée special by Jean Echenoz (review)

Echenoz,Jean.Envoyée spéciale.Paris: Minuit,2016.ISBN 978-2-7073-2922-6.Pp.313. 18,50 a. In his latest novel, Echenoz returns, with a great deal of brio, to the kind of genre fiction that made his reputation as a writer. It is a form less immediately concerned with genre than with fiction itself, one that wagers heavily on second-level discourse, and one wherein we readers are well advised to keep our wits about us. For the record, the genre in question here is the spy novel, and Echenoz subjects it to a variety of stresses, testing its possibilities and turning it to his own particular purposes. His experimentation is more sustained in this case than elsewhere in his work (this novel is significantly longer than any of its predecessors), and his narrative pace is a bit more dilatory, as well. I mean that latter remark in the best sense, for Envoyée spéciale is an example of what Ross Chambers has termed “loiterly literature,” that is, a text that takes its time, and invites us to take our time, too. There is a principal plotline here, to be sure, devolving upon nothing less than the security of the Free World; but it is by no means ortholinear and unwavering. To the contrary, that plotline is frequently interrupted, to strategic and ludic purpose, by digressions, excurses, and embedded narratives of different ilks. Though most of the action takes place in Paris, one is as likely to find oneself ensconced in the command cabin of a wind turbine in the Creuse; or in a Range Rover Sport V8 idling outside of a nightclub in Pyongyang (of all places); or in the mangrove flats of the Ivory Coast, fishing for “la saupe dont on se méfie car elle se nourrit d’algues hallucinogènes, l’inconsommable uranoscope, le pagre combatif ou l’aveugle beaux-yeux” (255). Throughout, Echenoz plays with his readers broadly and unabashedly.At times, he draws us into the fable, seductively deploying a narrative nous intended to make us feel that we are part of things and that we have a significant role to play.At other times however, he obliges us to step back and shake off our willing suspension of disbelief for a moment, in order better to consider the story he is telling as a carefully constructed artifact. Both kinds of gestures are unmistakable, clearly labeled for what they are; and granted that, both serve to make us reflect upon our own reading protocols and what we seek in this novel—or indeed in any other. In short, what Echenoz is really up to in this book is a meditation on fiction and its uses, a meditation cast as a fiction and availing itself of fiction’s own discursive norms, but whose critical and theoretical dimension is not diminished by virtue of that. The fun begins when we sign onto that project, reading the text in multiple ways, trying not to lose our footing as we follow the pleasingly baroque narrative peripatetics that Echenoz limns for us here, there, and pretty much everywhere. University of Colorado Warren Motte 204 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 ...