Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature (review)

With its timely critical perspective and artful combination of cultural history and literary analysis, Consumer Chronicles makes a major contribution to modern French studies. Innovative and ambitious, it spans the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at once charting the development of consumer culture in France and providing new insights into some familiar literary texts, as well as into a fascinating selection of lesser-known but astutely chosen novels. Offering a comprehensive overview of theories and critiques of consumer society, Walker’s Introduction provides a flexible critical framework, which the author then draws on to pull off an ingenious thematic approach. This blends the synchronic and the diachronic, identifying contexts and analysing texts to elucidate the development of French consumer culture from the advent of discretionary income and the democratization of luxe, through the evolution of small and department stores, to late-capitalist branding. While one chapter concentrates on Huysmans, and Walker devotes a further chapter to an intriguing analysis of fluidity and value systems in Gide’s L’Immoraliste, other chapters deftly cover broad spectrums. ‘Small Shops’ spans one hundred years, drawing on Balzac’s Grandeur et décadence de César Birrotteau, Zola’s Au bonheur des dames, Céline’s Mort à crédit, and Dutourd’s Au Bon Beurre, reminding readers of the tenacity of the French small-shopkeeper. Unsurprisingly, Au bonheur des dames also features in Walker’s ‘Big Stores’ chapter, but in a new light alongside less predictable interwar novels and some more recent representations of surveillance culture and dystopian superstores. The targeting of female consumers is also helpfully teased out, most interestingly when Walker examines the interwar years. His consideration of a more predictable range of 1960s female-authored novels — Les Belles Images, Roses à credit, Élise ou la vraie vie, Les Petits Enfants du siècle — occasionally pathologizes female consumers (Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images is described as figuring Laurence’s anorexia as an existential response to consumer culture, yet eating disorders remain notoriously resistant to definition and treatment). Although the impact of audiovisual culture is perhaps understated at times, Consumer Chronicles engages with an impressive range of well- and lesser-known texts and writers, including Aragon, Balzac, Beauvoir, Beigbeder, Céline, Curtis, Dutourd, Echenoz, Etcherelli, Houellebecq, Huysmans, Flaubert, Gide, Jacques, Le Clézio, MacOrlan, Margueritte, Pennac, Perec, Quignard, Rachilde, Rochefort, Roujon, Tournier, Triolet, Valmy-Baysse, and Zola. Innovative perspectives are offered on canonical novels, readers are introduced to or reminded of a range of new texts to discover, and the representation of patterns of consumption emerges as a productive critical tool. With a constant eye to future developments and to contemporary relevance, and its elegant prose (headings include ‘The Emporium Strikes Back’ and ‘Total Retail’), this varied yet coherent work is a pleasure to read. Furthermore, Consumer Chronicles offers scholars and undergraduates alike fresh purchase not only on the development of consumer culture in modern France, and on literary and theoretical engagements with it, but also on their own practices of critical consumption.