For decades, the French author and filmmaker Virginie Despentes has courted a precious, overlooked constituency: “the old hags, the dykes, the frigid,” as she writes in “King Kong Theory,” her expansive feminist manifesto, “all those girls who don’t get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick.”
People like her, she suggests.
Her characters are institutionalized, filmed during sex, addicts, bigots, cows in the abattoir. In her debut novel, an abjectly shocking book called “Rape Me,” two young women embark on a gleeful violent spree after a sexual assault. (Despentes considers her own gang rape, at 17, the foundation “of who I am as a writer, and as a woman who is no longer quite a woman.”)
She has become a shorthand for a class of rageful punks. The physical vulnerability inherent in being a woman is never far from her writing, where simply existing while female is best understood as a battleground.
Despentes’s latest novel, “Dear Dickhead,” is an epistolary story, built around correspondence between Rebecca, an aging movie star, and Oscar, an author accused of sexual harassment. He is the epithet of the title, though Rebecca displays some preening, bone-headed tendencies herself.
What begins as thoughtless online heckling — Oscar is disgusted to see that Rebecca, his former object of desire, has become “fat, scruffy, with repulsive skin,” and says so on Instagram — turns into a tender, almost familial relationship. Rebecca is understandably hostile at the outset, flinging back insults that are unprintable in this newspaper. An obsequious apology (he never dreamed she’d see his post) counts for little. But Rebecca replies almost in spite of herself; perversely, she admits that Oscar’s audacity to slag and then flatter her “commands a certain respect.”
The scope of their conversation dilates quickly, from screw-yous to Marguerite Duras, the heinous cult of Pilates, language’s inability to capture the nuance of violence. (“We have 45 words to describe shades of blue and only one to describe rape.”) Their exchanges are intercut with dispatches from Zoé, a young feminist blogger who is Oscar’s accuser and becomes deeply implicated in both their lives. But the volleys between Oscar and Rebecca power the book, and once the pandemic shuts down Paris, their intimacy flourishes.
“When you’re used to living at the edge of the frame, you feel pretty comfortable when the frame disintegrates,” Oscar confesses. “I think I’ve been losing the plot, and this human canvas has been holding me in.”
It’s a thrill to hear the characters develop on the page. Both are sarcastic, vulnerable, lacerating, consistently surprising. Thanks to the translator, Frank Wynne, their humor mostly remains intact. Rebecca boasts she has a valid credit card and cleavage that’s “proof of the existence of God.” Oscar, at a low moment, writes, “My sister suggests I cut off my finger. My best friend thinks I should have all my money confiscated. I’m fine. I’m feeling supported.”
“Dear Dickhead” has been billed as Despentes’s #MeToo novel, but that’s an oversimplification. It’s also one of the better portrayals of addiction I’ve encountered in literature, up there with books by Jean Rhys and Leslie Jamison, and one that almost convinces you of the exhilaration in using. Both Rebecca and Oscar have abused substances for years — “I manage the whole addiction thing so well, it’d be a shame not to carry on,” Rebecca half-jokes — and instinctively understand that their slavish compulsions are really about “loving what is stronger than you.”
Their stories are kept on a shorter leash than in Despentes’s other fiction. At times, I missed the fetid, loamy Paris of her masterwork, the Vernon Subutex trilogy, which follows an out-of-work record dealer bouncing around the Right Bank.
But this cramped focus is apt for a novel of addicts staring down grim prospects (professional obsolescence, saggy flesh, relapse). The newfound solidarity between Oscar and Rebecca, particularly when they urge each other to stay clean, helps awaken a greater empathy toward the world they once scorned. That’s the movement of the book: from rage and insouciance to the will to survive.
There is a stubbornly idealistic streak across Despentes’s fiction, and in “Dear Dickhead” it’s unmissable. Yes, threats are everywhere: Women who enjoy having sex with men “have to be ready to die,” Rebecca says. Staying sober is a war. Yet somehow, as “human beings humbled by the same machines,” we manage to find commonality.
To a point. As Rebecca reminds Oscar: “Let’s not push it. I’m still a legend.”
The post A French Punk Feminist Takes on #MeToo and Addiction appeared first on New York Times.
