By posting on Instagram a photo taken on the fly of Rebecca Latté, a movie star whose career is in decline, the writer Oscar Jayack opens a Pandora’s box that he is not about to close. The 50-year-old actress, he writes, looks like a “toad” and seems to him to have become the “tragic metaphor for an era that is going to the rocks”.
Rebecca Latté responds bluntly to the one she immediately qualifies as an “asshole”: “You are like a pigeon who would have shit on my shoulder in passing. The tone is set, and that bittersweet flavor enhances the narrative throughout the 350 pages of Dear assholethe eleventh novel by Virginie Despentes, consisting mainly of back and forth between the two narrators.
The writer, whose older sister was a friend of Rebecca as a teenager, erases her publication, apologizes quickly and admits to her that they know each other vaguely, having both grown up in Nancy: “Jayack is a pseudonym. We were the Jocard family. »
Both will tame each other, remember the past, tell each other, gradually counterbalance “daily shit” by sending each other “miles of letters” and will quickly find common ground. Starting with their rampant misanthropy and love of getting high: coke, hashheroin, anxiolytics, alcohol.
When Zoé Katana, a former publishing press attaché who became the author of a radical feminist blog, “metooises” Oscar Jayack, their epistolary relationship falters, but continues. The rebellious actress (who could bring to mind Béatrice Dalle, friend of Virginie Despentes) refuses to give in to the dictates of the time — “Rather die than do yoga” —, but does not advance either without avoiding certain clichés of ” punk attitude “.
The Oracle Despentes
Welcomed each time in France like an oracle – a bit like the messianic appearances of the character of Vernon Subutex in the trilogy of the same name – Virginie Despentes, 53, in whom some see a sort of feminine Houellebecq , more rag than lace and adept at controversial statements, does not have his tongue in his pocket.
We will remember his controversial remarks in The Inrocks a few days after the tragic attack of January 2015 against the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo : “I was also the guys who come in with their weapons. Those who had just bought a Kalashnikov on the black market and had decided, in their own way, the only one available to them, to die standing rather than live on their knees. »
In Dear assholethe author of fuck me and of king kong theory talks a lot, talks to us about everything and nothing, but through the epistolary form she slips into each other’s skin and makes the voices resound on both sides of the barricade.
This is an opportunity for her to express herself on a number of current topics, ranging from #MeToo to the experience of confinement linked to COVID-19, including drug addiction, cinema, Louis- Ferdinand Céline, rap (“gangsta rap is the performance of power by those it has crushed”), activism on the Internet (“pure fanaticism”) or even feminism: “Dear sisters, one more effort, we are already almost as dumb as guys. Less power. »
It’s sometimes funny, often irreverent, that the writer recycles the spirit of the times or that she spits in the face of the times. But over time and letter by letter, each of the correspondents will end up being permeable to the ideas of the other.
Perhaps this is the greatest merit of this slightly misshapen novel, full of protuberances, and which makes it richer than the sum of its parts.