The literary rentrée, the excitement it creates when you read a bunch of books very quickly, creates this: a tendency to see common motifs, forms that stretch between novels, like a small network, which can be akin to a slight paranoia, but which also often gives food for thought. So I will probably talk soon about the recurrence of a character who is the-young-girl-who-is-bad, but this morning, I wanted to talk about something else: the relationship to genre, to the bad genre to be exact, spy thriller, dark novel, and how they fit into white literature. And I wanted to mention it in relation to two books whose quality, in my opinion, is unequal: the first is called “Journal intime d’un maître-chanteur” by Philippe Vasset published by Flammarion, and the second “Que du vent” by Yves Ravey published by Éditions de Minuit – Yves Ravey, Philippe Vasset, you will notice in passing a slight homophony which must have contributed to the connection.
The first one by Vasset is the first-person account of a professional blackmailer, once king of the “Eldorado of dirty laundry” as he says, but who has run out of money, overtaken by new tools, especially digital ones, which now allow everyone to leak intimate photos, sex videos, in short a world where secrets are no longer sold in the same way, and where schemes, telephoto lenses, nighttime hideouts are no longer as effective. However, he does not give up, joins forces with a group of mysterious young women, a sort of swarm of bees whose gossip makes honey, to set up a gossip site and make the powerful pay up.
Mystery and truth
Que du vent” by Yves Ravey is also a first-person story, that of a middle-aged man, owner of a shed in which he stores cleaning products, who becomes friends with a couple of neighbors, Miko and Sally, lets himself be seduced by the wife, who quite quickly suggests a sex, involving breaking into a safe and hiding money in detergent cans, before running away together.
There is something in both books that resists: it is this way of flirting with the wrong genre: the railway station novel in the case of Philippe Vasset, with this character of a Parisian crook, who knows the capital like the back of his hand and practices it as if we were still in the seventies, or in a book by Manchette. The thriller in the case of Yves Ravey, or the dark novel elsewhere, with this vaguely mafia, American, southern or not, these settings of a chic suburban house and this hangar, a typical place for laundering dirty money, or a hideout for drug traffickers.
Yves Ravey finds in a very simple, blank writing, a formidable mystery: very difficult to say where we are, and what the stakes of this heist story really are, and yet the suspense works, the characters exist, and in particular Sally, this fascinating adulterous wife who is almost Durassian, when Duras sets her action in indeterminate and vaguely American settings. Vasset, for his part, gets a little tangled up, it seems to me, in his frame of reference, and the story, which is well-crafted, suffers from the fact that it suffers from anachronism more than it plays on it: this cunning character does not exist in what is described as our contemporary world, and the tricks he sets up – blackmailing a footballer or the heir to a large family – are quite implausible, in a story that otherwise does not renounce plausibility.
It is difficult to maintain in the novel different modalities, which are as many relationships that the story maintains with the truth, the necessity or not, that it comes to pass. Philippe Vasset’s novel seems to hesitate too much and oscillates a little vainly, while Ravey’s manages to hold on a very fine border between the new novel and the popular novel.
