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Virginie Despentes.
Caustic social comment … Virginie Despentes. Photograph: Alexandre Isard/Paris Match/Getty Images
Caustic social comment … Virginie Despentes. Photograph: Alexandre Isard/Paris Match/Getty Images

Vernon Subutex 3 by Virginie Despentes review – the trilogy concludes

This article is more than 3 years old

Flashes of vulgar energy and trademark cynicism enliven an overlong finale of ageing French rockers

When the first volume in the punk-feminist writer Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy appeared in English in 2015, it was a cause for excitement. Here was a big, brash, enjoyable slab of French recession fiction, a social novel full of ageing rockers and party-worn broads who drink cans of lager, DJ in scuzzy clubs and kip on their mates’ couches – the sort of crowd usually refused entry to Parisian literature. Despentes, whose inaugural notoriety was the spree-killing road novel Baise-Moi (she also directed the banned film adaptation), appeared to have matured into a more expansive view of class, gender relations and power dynamics. Vernon Subutex looked as though it might become the kind of generational group portrait that Roberto Bolaño gave us of Mexican youth in The Savage Detectives. The question was whether Despentes, accustomed to snarling her truths over the fictive equivalent of three distorted power-chords, could sustain a project that, by the trilogy’s end, would amass 1,000 pages.

On reading the second volume, I had doubts. Despite the three-page index of main characters (Vernon Subutex 3 has one too, and I needed it throughout), Despentes kept introducing new ones, splitting off into intensity-draining subplots. The gig was in danger of becoming an interminable encore that no one wanted to hear. Still, there were bursts of entertainingly caustic social comment, and insights on contemporary Parisian life.

As Vernon Subutex 3 commences, the eponymous hero, a one-time record-store owner and unlikely ladies’ man, continues to lead his ragtag group around France. He DJs at drug- and phone-free “convergences” – temporary autonomous-zone raves at which, despite Subutex doing little more than lining up 90s rock hits on a playlist, devotees experience mass peace-and-love transcendence. Alex Bleach, the rock star whose shadowy death was the plot catalyst back in season one, features in this volume only via snatches from the monologic videos he recorded in his last days, which Vernon splices into his DJ sets. The young Muslim Aïcha and her pal Céleste are in hiding, having kidnapped, tortured and mutilated the Weinstein-esque film producer Laurent Dopalet in retribution for his alleged murder of Aïcha’s porn-actor mother Vodka Satana. Dopalet himself is laying low, traumatised and brooding on vengeance.

Lemmy at the Glastonbury festival, 2015. Photograph: Samir Hussein/Redferns/Getty Images

Despentes is the kind of novelist who unabashedly lets her political convictions show in her work, and Subutex’s convergences are her effort at imagining a collective space that fulfils the utopian promise contained in the rock music she and her characters revere (Lemmy from Motörhead gets a two-page elegy, and we are never far from a mention of Bowie, Nirvana or Leonard Cohen). The problem is that these rock’n’roll raves are woefully underimagined, and come across as a bathetic travesty of resistance.

It’s one problem among many in this sagging, unkempt novel. The peripheral characters lack distinctiveness, their urban melodramas unfurling in soap operatic sameness so it’s hard to care about what’s happening. The prose is a mush of stale formulations. One man is described as “a colourful character Xavier has always avoided like the plague”, and a few pages later, we are informed that “Max, who’d given 110 per cent, hit a bad patch”. The impression is of a writer always racing towards a deadline or a word-count, rarely stopping to think whether a fresher or more vital approach might be found. While there are flashes of the vulgar energy and trademark cynicism that animate Despentes’s best writing, I found myself wishing she had taken the time to write a shorter book, compressing three sloppy volumes into a lean, focused one.

Towards the end, the Bataclan terrorist attacks take place, and one suspects that the real-life tragedy threw up a narrative inconvenience for Despentes: following shortly after, her trilogy’s climax is itself an echo of what happened in Paris on 13 November 2015. The ending thus also resembles that of a prior Despentes novel, Apocalypse Baby, which in turn resembled that of a certain Michel Houellebecq novel. We need not compare every contemporary French novelist to Houellebecq, but here there’s no avoiding it. Despentes’s characters are wont to accuse one another of mansplaining, but I’d gladly have had someone mansplain to me what she was getting at when, in this half-assed it’s in Collins! speculative coda, she suggests that Subutex’s Cobain-and-Cohen playlists have opened up some sort of cosmic portal by way of “a genotypic communion of synchronous energies, corresponding waves and cardiac rhythm progressions”. The trouble is, Despentes hasn’t tried hard enough to make her readers believe even she knew what she is on about.

Vernon Subutex 3 is translated by Frank Wynne and published by Maclehose (£18.99). To order a copy for £13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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