THE BOMBSHELL, by Darrow Farr
If a book could possess “French-Girl Style” — that aspirational Parisian chic the internet tries to trick me into believing can be achieved with bangs or Repetto ballet flats — “The Bombshell” would have it. Darrow Farr’s debut novel is effortlessly cool: a smart, sophisticated tale of sexual and political awakening over the course of a fateful summer that reads like falling into an Éric Rohmer film.
In June 1993, Séverine Guimard is a reluctant transplant from Paris to Ajaccio, the Corsican capital, where her French politician father has been appointed prefect. Like many 17-year-old girls, she is a complex creature: pampered but eager to escape her rich parents, prickly but charming, beautiful but deeply insecure. She dreams of moving to Los Angeles to become an actress, believing herself destined for stardom and a “big, dazzling, important life.”
When we first meet Séverine, she is seducing a classmate. Seen as a snob by the girls at school, Séverine is friendless in Ajaccio, and her extracurricular hobby is claiming the virginities of quiet boys and basking in their devotion. “She liked the idea of being never-forgotten, a landmark,” Farr writes. “She liked the feverish tremors they emitted when she ignored them in the hallway afterward.”
Already versed in the ways that sex is weaponized against women — the boy she lost her virginity to slut-shames her in school; her father’s boss, the minister of the interior, propositions her at a party — she has also learned to wield it as her own tool of manipulation. And the threat of sexual violence looms over what follows: While riding her bike that same evening, Séverine is seized by three masked men, stuffed into the trunk of a car, taken to a cottage deep in the island’s wilderness, and held for ransom.
It soon becomes clear, however, that her abductors, Tittu, Petru and Bruno, are not seasoned guerrillas but new revolutionaries — virgin militants, you might say — and are unable or unwilling to harm her. Kidnapping Séverine is their first major act as the Corsican independence group Soffiu di Libertà, and it promptly goes awry.
The French government refuses their terms for release, and as Séverine’s captivity stretches on into the summer, she surprises herself by growing genuinely attached to the men. When Bruno, their de facto leader, introduces Séverine to texts by Fanon, Guevara, Marx and Lenin, she confronts for the first time the cost of her immense privilege. “She’d always known abstractly that people starved, that girls were mutilated, that people were being slaughtered,” Farr writes, “but it never occurred to her that that world overlapped in any way with hers. She’d never realized that she lived amid injustice, that she might even be contributing to it.” In a Patty-Hearst-ian twist, Séverine announces to her captors that she wants to join their cause.
However, Séverine’s motives remain murky. Is she really a believer, or just attracted to Bruno? Is she exploiting them to find the fame she craves? All of the above? Farr expertly dances around revealing the entire truth, which takes a back seat to the action when Soffiu di Libertà starts carrying out a series of bombings with Séverine as their public face. Things become morally grayer at every step, and while Séverine claims she is inspiring a Corsican revolution, the attacks also happen to settle personal vendettas from her old life among the French elite.
As both the violence and Séverine’s romantic entanglement intensify, she knows the group is “hurtling toward a cliff’s edge on a train whose brakes she herself had dismantled.” The reader spends much of the novel’s gripping, propulsive second half bracing for the moment when it all blows up. There is a sense of relief when the book’s final section jumps 20 years into the future, and we discover the fates of Soffiu di Libertà’s comrades from a slight remove. The narrative structure mirrors Séverine’s own transition from girlhood to womanhood: heady and reckless and dangerously fun in its early days, maturing into something a little wiser, sadder and softer by the end.
THE BOMBSHELL | By Darrow Farr | Pamela Dorman | 408 pp. | $30
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