Roman américain par by Antoine Bello (review)

C’est ainsi que le référendum du 27 avril 1969, dont le résultat négatif mit fin à la présidence de Charles de Gaulle, aurait eu lieu “deux ans après Mai 68” (53). Mais il est vrai qu’il ne s’agit que d’un petit nombre d’erreurs dans le cadre d’un grand nombre de pages, que le semblant d’intrigue n’incite guère le lecteur à continuer à tourner. On ne peut pas dire que ce livre soit mal écrit. Il relève simplement d’un choix stylistique où le mot “anesthésie” prend tout son sens. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Bello,Antoine. Roman américain. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. ISBN 978-2-07-014429-7. Pp. 288. 18,50 a. There is a reason surrealism never established itself in the United States: American life is naturally surrealistic. Or so Bello seems to think. Roman américain is set in Florida and is structured around the twenty-first century’s version of the epistolary novel, the email exchange. Dan Siver and Vlad Eisinger did their Masters degrees at Columbia in Comparative Literature with the hope of becoming novelists. Dan persisted and published a series of largely unremarked fictions, whereas Vlad turned to journalism where he is writing in The World Street Tribune a series of articles exposing the fraud inherent in the sale of “life settlements.” This is a scam in which unscrupulous companies buy life insurance policies from elderly people, promise them health coverage until they die, and then, cash in the policy for a big gain when the insured passes away. Vlad’s articles, which appear at regular intervals in chapters formatted to look like the other Wall Street newspaper, detail the myriad variations of this swindle. Dan, who lives in Florida and knows many of the people affected by Vlad’s articles, forever interjects into his emails comments on the state of American fiction, and the possibility of someone finally writing the great American novel. In the process he comes to understand that what Vlad is doing may indeed be just that: “Tu cherches à chroniquer ton époque à travers le négoce de polices d’assurance-vie, comme Steinbeck ou Melville se sont servis de la mécanisation de l’agriculture ou de la chasse à la baleine pour peindre la leur” (95). For Dan the great achievement of the contemporary American imagination may not be in the realm of literature, but in the field of commerce. This is where Americans constantly display their ability to market for profit what amounts to the hole in the center of the donut. To do this so consistently and successfully requires a sort of genius, the capacity to achieve the willing suspension of disbelief, which is also the novelist’s goal. The seller of life-settlement policies attempts to create something from nothing, to invent needs the way the artist invents characters. Both offer imaginary worlds the reader and the consumer are anxious to enter. The final similarity between literature and commerce is that each plays games with its audience, daring people to see beyond an engaging surface. This 260 FRENCH REVIEW 89.2 Reviews 261 is apparent in the glee both men take in anagrams. To the question,“que devient Estella Ribstone?” (73), the answer is “Bret Easton Ellis” (74). Given this delight, American readers will wonder at the name“Vlad Eisinger,”since for most of us the only Vlad we are familiar with is Vlad the Impaler. This curiosity is only piqued by the novel’s last sentence, an exchange between Dan and Vlad: “tu as des nouvelles de Vlad Eisinger?” (287), demonstrating that at times a good con is an intriguing pleasure. Florida State University William Cloonan Besson, Patrick. L’indulgence du soleil et de l’automne. Paris: Fayard, 2015. ISBN 9782 -213-62965-0. Pp. 112. 13 a. Besson is an author who does not take the logistics of our existence too seriously. Human history serves as a draft that can be deconstructed and reassembled, and that goes also for our everyday life. The result is often funny, at least noteworthy, as can be read in Besson’s new collection of nine...