Vernon Subutex: A Novel by Virginie Despentes

By Wilson McBee

Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex novels—two of out three have been translated from French into English, with the third to be released next year—have not yet made a big splash in American literary culture. One should be wary of trying to figure out why anything is happening, or not happening, in America these days, so I won’t speculate about possible reasons for the books’ relative insignificance stateside. But it is obvious at least to me that Despentes’s trilogy should be a bigger a deal than it currently is. Brash, provocative, heartbreaking, the Vernon Subutex books offer a biting taxonomic portrait of twenty-first-century society that should resonate as much to American readers as European ones. While the specific milieu portrayed is contemporary France, the book raises internationally relevant questions about community in the age of social media, the importance of authenticity in art, and shifting notions of racial and gender identities. Despentes writes with an unrestrained vibrancy, shifting among a large cast of characters in a careening free-indirect discourse that often devolves into brilliant monologuic rants. In our current age of exquisite autofiction, in which the window of what certain authors are allowed to write about given their identity sometimes seems to be narrowing, Despentes’s rainbow-colored character tapestry comes off as refreshingly rebellious.

The Vernon Subutex novels’ eponymous hero is a former record-store owner who, as the first book begins, has run out of money and has resorted to selling his personal property in order to stay afloat. Then he is evicted from his apartment, and his attempts to procure temporary lodging among an ever widening net of Parisian friends and acquaintances forms the novel’s structure. But instead of sticking with Vernon’s point of view as he surfs from one couch to another, Despentes roves among the characters flushed into view along the way. A chapter might begin with a new character, and the connection to Vernon isn’t made clear until we’re several pages in. Sometimes things happen to Vernon offscreen, as it were, and we only learn about it later, after Despentes has picked up the thread again. The result is a kind of woven narrative structure that gets more impressive the further you read.

In the way that the Vernon Subutex books spite conventional plotting in order to devote lengthy passages to a character’s backstory and everyday preoccupations, they recall Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, a European export that has managed to find an audience in America. But whereas the narrator of Cusk’s books filters the stories of her companions into essayistic soliloquies, Despentes’s mosaic is composed of diaristic, often-unhinged diatribes that go more directly to the heart of her characters. Here is a passage written from the perspective of Kiko, a coke-addled banker who lets Vernon live in his sprawling apartment for a spell until Vernon starts sleeping with his girlfriend, a trans model from Brazil:

Our advantage is speed, ubiquity is our gift. The meteor moves too fast for anyone to alter its trajectory, it’s all about intuition. Kiko can sense time, he is the big hand on the watch. In global time. He is the swiftest, the strongest. It’s nothing to do with the drugs. He is in control. A quick bump first thing in the morning and he’s off and running, no more hits until he takes a break at two p.m.—his first line. He is in control, during the day he takes only what he needs to keep riding the gnarly wave. He never spins out. He is an exceptional surfer.

Contrast that with the following section from the perspective of Sophie, the mother-in-law of Vernon’s friend Xavier, and you get a sense of Despentes’s remarkable range. Sylvie is still grieving over the death of her other son, from a drug overdose, and her chapter contains some of the books’ most emotionally affecting writing:

Everything in the house fell into two categories: things that were there when Nicolas was alive and those they had acquired since. Every lightbulb changed was another handful of earth tossed onto the coffin of her son. She dissolved into tears when the coffee machine stopped working. This machine that he had touched. A cup that broke as it was being rinsed tugged at her insides. This cup that he had rinsed so often after he’d had his morning coffee.

These rapid vignettes constitute one of Vernon Subutex’s principal pleasures, especially given the spectrum of society covered: there are porn stars, a slick film producer, full-time vagrants, a pious young Muslim woman, Neo-Nazis, ex-musicians, ex-groupies. One comes away from the books having undergone an extended exercise in empathy-building: they could be the French literary version of Brandon Stanton’s profound Humans of New York photography/oral history project.

But there’s a reason the trilogy is named after Vernon. It’s his story, after all. And yet, although Vernon is at the nominal center of the novels, the sections written from his perspective often deflect from telling us who he really is. When not concerned with acquiring the pressing needs of shelter, food, and Internet access, Vernon’s mostly assessing the visual qualities of the women in his life or opining on music. “Vernon does not have the attention span to be truly depressed,” his chronicler explains. “This has always saved him.” And so Vernon emerges most clearly when viewed through the eyes of other characters. He’s shaggily handsome, with piercing blue eyes, and a quiet, avoidant demeanor that is interpreted alternately as wisdom, spiritual depth, or innocence. Emilie, the bereft mistress of Vernon’s deceased friend Jean-No, cuts Vernon’s hair and ponders the man before her: “She is overwhelmed by a tenderness that has nothing to do with desire, nor something one might feel for a child. It is the tenderness of an adult woman yielding before another person’s fragility.” Sylvie, whom Vernon beds and then robs, is charmed and mystified by him: “Vernon is gentle, Vernon fucks divinely, Vernon is a little disturbing. Vernon has got everything going for him.” Patrice is a disgruntled ex-musician whose wife has finally kicked him out after suffering his physical abuse for years. He looks at Vernon and sees someone who, despite the fact that he’s broke and homeless, has managed to maintain his purity: “Vernon still has all his hair too. And those blue eyes really pay off at his age. There is something about this face that is not tainted.”

In addition to the travails of its titular character, another through-line in Vernon Subutex One ties the book’s disparate cast together. The book begins just after the overdose death of Alex Bleach, a French rock star somewhere between Kurt Cobain and Lenny Kravitz. An old friend of Vernon’s, Bleach has been helping pay his rent; the cessation of these funds is a principal factor in forcing Vernon onto the street. But Bleach has left Vernon a legacy that could ultimately be even more lucrative. Not long before his death, Bleach, hanging out at Vernon’s apartment while in the throws of a drug binge, recorded an interview with himself, a kind of videotaped last will and testament. He has left the tape with Vernon, and although Vernon has never watched it, he thinks he might be able to sell it for a few Euros. But Vernon seriously underestimates its importance. Even as Vernon continues his tour of free accommodations, a search for Vernon himself, triggered in part by the search for the videotape of Bleach, begins to be conducted, much of it over social media. At the end of the first volume, these two searches coalesce, fueling the events of the second book.

Much like Vernon, Alex Bleach is somewhat of a void, charming in a mystical way; people seemed to be drawn to both men despite their better judgment. Doubts about Alex’s actual musical abilities are prevalent; he’s a kind of snake-oil salesman to those looking for coolness. Even Bleach’s would-be biographer, a young music writer named Lydia Bazooka who hooks up with Vernon after she hears she might have intel on Bleach, admits that her proposed book is “too middle-class hipster for the baby fascists of her generation. Alex is old hat.” Speaking to Lydia, Vernon admits, “We didn’t think he was the most talented, we thought it was unfair that he hit the jackpot.”

In positioning these two eternally teenage boys—one broke and homeless, one dead—at the center of these books, it certainly seems like Despentes, an avowed feminist whose first novel features a rape-and-revenge fantasy, is trying to make a point about masculinity in the twenty-first century, namely what it’s good for and what we should do about it. The novel abounds with deceased or otherwise missing boys—Alex Bleach, Sophia’s son, and Jean-No are among the dead, while Sylvie reflects on her son, recently gone to college: “Boys do not kill their mothers, they leave them.” Most of the women in the book are ascendant and powerful while the men are nearly all failures if not outright villains. And at the end of Vernon Subutex One, when Vernon fully hits rock bottom, having resorted to living on the street and pan-handling, one is inclined to interpret this fate as a just, if tragic, requiem for the archetypal dude of the twentieth century. For all his coolness, for all his musical knowledge, for all his sex appeal, Vernon hasn’t been able to save himself. He’s been judged to be a kind of societal redundancy.

And yet the events of Vernon Subutex Two call this reading into question. Soon after the book’s beginning, Vernon is finally found by the crowd that’s been looking for him. In a brilliant left turn from Despentes, a congregation of sorts springs up around the broken man. Instead of raking Vernon over the coals for lying and taking advantage of them, they celebrate him, visiting him like a guru in the public park where he’s decided to live, listening to his playlists and communing with one another. The second volume moves more slowly than the first, existing almost as an extended rumination on the themes raised by its predecessor. Meanwhile Despentes approaches the story with increasing ambivalence. Throughout the book one wonders whether she is setting up Vernon and his crew of acolytes as a parody with catastrophic consequences, or if they’re meant to represent the best parts of the old freedom-loving rock-and-roll culture. The book ends in a mood of uncertainty, with the group having left Paris to constitute itself as a kind of travelling commune. English readers will have to wait for the final entry in the trilogy to be translated before we learn whether Despentes means to answer the questions raised by the first two books or simply deepen our understanding of their complexity. Hopefully by then, more American readers will have caught on to what Desepentes is doing, and her books will gain the audience they deserve.