Dear readers,
Considering the amount of flop sweat, vigilance and pure performance art it takes to be just one person in the world, I am always impressed by people who manage to lead double lives. Like the nest of Russian intelligence operatives recently uncovered in Brazil, secretly serving at the pleasure of the Kremlin while they posed for years as students, small business owners, even models. (Some evaded the Polícia Federal and got away; the rest were apparently undone by bogus birth certificates and “gringo Portuguese,” among other things.)
The two books in this week’s newsletter don’t have much to do with beachy espionage, nor the shadowy cabals and gray trench coats of a John le Carré or Graham Greene novel. The protagonists here are, you could say, double agents of their own making: ordinary citizens whose unremarkable public personas serve as cover stories for stranger, seamier things. Their only real motive is self-preservation and the stakes (divorce, ignominy, maybe jail) are relatively low. But creating a whole second self without help from king or country? That deserves a deeper dive.
—Leah
“Adèle,” by Leila Slimani
Fiction, 2014 (2019 in America)
The French Moroccan writer and journalist Leila Slimani is probably best known for “The Perfect Nanny,” a harrowing portrait of infanticide whose cool, ambiguous style defied its lurid Lifetime-y title. (Originally, it went by the more genteel “Chanson Douce,” or “Lullaby.”) That book became a sensation in Slimani’s home country in 2016, earning her a prestigious Prix Goncourt, and was released stateside not long after.
Slimani’s actual debut, “Dans le Jardin de L’Ogre” (“In the Garden of the Ogre”), won prizes too, but didn’t leap across the Atlantic quite so quickly — maybe because her publishers determined, not wrongly, that American readers would choose the moral clarity of wanton, senseless child murder over a bourgeois Parisian wife and mother who can’t stop sleeping with men she mostly despises.
Translated by Sam Taylor and unwhimsically retitled “Adèle,” it landed here a few years after “The Perfect Nanny,” to a lesser reception. I personally prefer it, though — in part because it is so incurably, outrageously French. Adèle is 35 and carelessly beautiful in the way of all European women in our minds; an actress turned journalist who quietly disdains both her job and her dutiful surgeon husband. She is similarly conflicted about her young son and even her only real friend, a glamorous and sympathetic photographer.
Adèle needs their presence to bolster the illusion of a respectful life, but finds the reality of it a terrible trap, full of sulfurous dead air and obligation. The only thing that makes her feel alive, really, is having sex with men who are not her husband. Short, fat, bad hygiene or worse teeth: None of it matters except that they make her feel pleasantly obliterated. In coitus — the more debased and anonymous the better — “her anxieties dissolve. Her sensations return. Her soul is lighter, her head an empty space.”
Like most addictions, Adèle’s accelerates; she takes more risks (an affair with her husband’s boss, for one), tells more lies, grows increasingly dissatisfied. Slimani doesn’t make the sex anything to aspire to, or even offer some therapeutic justification for her protagonist’s choices. A few brief encounters with Adèle’s perfect harridan of a mother say enough.
I can tell you that it ends better for Adèle than for Emma Bovary, her literary sister in there-must-be-more-than-this ennui. Or maybe not; it depends what your definition of freedom is.
Read if you like: A cigarette before breakfast, the movies “Shame” and “Belle du Jour,” the collected works of Mary Gaitskill.
“My Revolutions,” by Hari Kunzru
Fiction, 2007
No croissants or knee-scraping seductions in cobblestone alleys here; Michael Frame is a suburban British dad so aggressively bland, he seems more like a vague middle-aged shape than a man. His wife, Miranda, is busy peddling some kind of small business in “natural botanicals” and his teenage stepdaughter is away at college; even the friends invited to his upcoming 50th birthday party, he admits, are more Miranda’s than his.
Certainly none of them know that he has spent the last few decades in “a kind of mental crouch,” waiting to be found out for the person he actually is: a former ’60s student radical named Chris Carver whose fiery political ideals once led him down a path to domestic terrorism, and possibly worse.
If the present tense of “My Revolutions” didn’t take place over 20 years ago, you get the sense this whole case would have been cracked by the internet in about a minute: a haiku, not a novel. But technology here has not yet become the all-seeing eye that might have swept up Chris and his former cohort at any tax audit or T.S.A. gate. Only one guy seems to have sniffed out something, a slippery long-ago acquaintance who may have infiltrated Chris’s small band of revolutionaries as a narc.
In the middle of everything there is also, of course, a pretty girl — a femme (possibly fatale) and fellow anarchist whose purity of purpose in the book’s flashbacks easily eclipsed Chris’s, even when they were just squatting in London housing estates and messing around with pipe bombs. As the group’s use of violence escalates, he broods and wobbles, a reluctant fundamentalist; she is Joan of Arc, forged in fire. But did she stay and burn in the end, or slip away?
Kunzru teases several mysteries without fully filling out the interior world of either Chris or Michael. In all his forms, he’s a bit of a hologram, though his emptiness also fits the profile: a man who surrendered himself to the cause many years ago, and essentially stayed gone.
Read if you like: D.I.Y. explosives, the Italian section in Rachel Kushner’s “The Flamethrowers,” the Sidney Lumet movie “Running on Empty.”
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