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Downtime Books-National News A French Life
| A French Life |
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| Friday, 12 October 2007 | |
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by Jean-Paul Dubois
Hamish Hamilton, 2007:
276p, hardcover.
Jean-Paul Dubois, a
journalist and novelist who
has written about the United
States and readily admits his
admiration for such
American writers as Philip
Roth and John Updike,
created something of a
sensation in France with his
twelfth book, ‘Une Vie
française’. Published in 2004
by a small and dynamic
publisher renowned for their
translations of transatlantic
fiction, this novel, by turns
comic and sombre, won the
coveted Femina prize — no
small feat for a book whose
narrator is, in some ways, the
epitome of the modern
French male (the jury of
Femina is entirely female). Jean-Paul Dubois is as French as the rugby team and sausage of his native Toulouse and, despite his German-sounding name, so is his rudderless hero Paul Blick. Blick grandpère was a shepherd attached to his native Pyrénées and Blick’s mother is a proofreader attached to the niceties of the French language. But through a combination of domestic and public mishaps Paul himself is cast adrift. The death of his older brother locks his parents in permanent grief. The student revolt of May ’68 gives him more of a taste of freedom than he is able to digest. The ambitious company executive he is married to never lets him forget that she is the family breadwinner and a couple of desultory extra-marital affairs leave him feeling sexually inadequate. By the end of the novel, Blick, aged 54, a bankrupt widower reduced to working as a gardener, looks back on his life as a sports writer, internationally known nature photographer, husband, son and father. Dispirited, wearied by a fate that has dealt him few winning cards – or rather cards he has not managed to play right – he tots up his achievements and finds they weigh very little compared to his failures. His photographs have gone round the world, but he has been unable to communicate with his own family. His story ends on a particularly poignant note as he takes his clinically depressed daughter on a visit to the Pyrénées. The two of them stand speechless on the mountain where Paul’s grandfather had watched his flock of sheep, Paul puts his arm around his daughter and feels as if he were hugging a dead tree. This isn’t to say that ‘A French Life’ does not have joyful, funny or sexy moments. Dubois is an incisive writer and is as good at pinpointing life’s absurdities as he is at fleshing out its tragic ironies. Still, in the end, the most memorable thing about his novel is its tone of disenchantment. Paul’s life is set in counterpoint to the main events of the Fifth Republic, from de Gaulle’s presidency to the second term of Jacques Chirac (Mitterrand even makes a brief personal appearance in Paul’s life). Paul and perhaps Jean-Paul Dubois himself have a far from flattering view of French politics, to say the least. Literature is not one of the arenas where the French rooster crows. |
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