Fiction: To follow successfully an outstanding début novel is the toughest test for any writer. Marie Darrieussecq, deservedly established as the most exciting French literary voice currently at work, has cleared that hurdle with style not once, but twice, writes Eileen Battersby
The publication in 1996 of Pig Tales, a surreal fable about a young woman who is dramatically transformed into a pig, and hovers uncomfortably between her human and porcine forms, proved a literary sensation. Within three days, Darrieussecq was famous and French fiction had found an intelligent, subversive and entertaining saviour.
Many qualities made Pig Tales work, not least the quasi-gormless, quasi-knowing voice of the narrator, a young woman with scant education but immense physical allure and unusual amounts of willingness to please. This affability, combined with her desperation to secure a job, leads her to employment in a massage parlour, which sounds more like adventure playground crossed with brothel. There she tends her clients. She also finds love of sorts with the lascivious, soon to be disgusted Honoré.
All is quickly not-so-good as our heroine's ample charms begin to swell and swell. With freewheeling candour she keeps the reader informed as to the physical changes going on, while also chronicling her dying romance with Honoré. But there is far more to this extraordinary yarn than a heroine entering the world of Kafka. Darrieussecq, who was born in Bayonne in 1969, is also making large statements about life in an inhumane, ruthless society where sexual corruption is merely dangerous escapism. Pig Tales is original and daring and as explosive a political satire as Animal Farm was in 1945.
Success in France was matched the following year with the US and British publications in English translation. Pig Tales manages to be grotesque, earthy and outrageously funny through its Moll Flanders-ish narrator, while also a profound study of loss and alienation. Admittedly, when the pig girl finds true love it is through the handsome Yvan, who on cue, at each full moon, transforms into a wolf, acquiring when in this state a wolf's appetites. The resourceful couple are able to appease this problem by ordering pizzas from various firms throughout Paris: "I ate the pizza, Yvan ate the pizza man."
As expected, the UK publication of My Phantom Husband in 1999 was something of an event for all who had read Pig Tales. Here was a French writer who was clever without being pretentiously intellectual and was funny without looking to melodrama. Above all, she was a thousand times more inventive than any British writer of her generation. My Phantom Husband was far more serious than Pig Tales. Again told in the first person, it is sombre, more subtle and as offbeat, albeit in a quieter way.
The narrator waits for her husband to return from buying bread. They have been married for seven years. He never comes home. There are no clues. He simply vanishes. His disappearance leaves the narrator in a state of mourning that develops into more than a personal lament.
It becomes an exploration of love and loss but, more specifically, of the nature and meaning of love, as well as the relevance of relationships. It is an intensely philosophical, abstract work, yet Darrieussecq never allows it to become tedious or dry.
Having written two excellent, highly original and unusual novels, Darrieussecq did not disappoint with her third novel, Breathing Underwater (Paris, 1999; London, 2001), in which a young woman walks out of her life, taking with her only her small daughter.
They drive to the seaside. Told in a detached third person, the novel is a study of willed displacement; the young woman wants to fall out of her old life. Darrieussecq creates an atmosphere of apathy with intent.
Into this odyssey of self enters a private investigator who has been hired by the deserted husband. As the woman sheds her old existence, her perceptions become sharper, more defined, as if surrounded by a sharper, brighter life where the senses surge. Colours are more vivid. She appears to be experiencing the physical world for the first time.
It is this ability to define and redefine the ordinary in an intense, deliberate way that makes each of her first three novels so exciting and compelling - she ensures that the reader does not want to miss an allusion or a nuance.
The achievement of those first three novels does, however, starkly compound the failure of her fourth, A Brief Stay with the Living, and makes its flatness all the more difficult to comprehend. Had the French publication date of 2001 not been given, it would be easy to assume this was in fact her first book, published belatedly because of the international success of her previous books. But no, it is her fourth book and proves a peculiarly diffident performance from an unusually assured writer.
A mother and her three daughters share a communal continuous stream of consciousness narrative that tells the story of a respective day in each of their lives. The cumulative effect is also to piece together a family history marred by a tragedy. There is also the fact that the parents were divorced; the father of the girls lives in Gibraltar while the mother is remarried to a man symbolically marked by a damaged face.
There is a weary urgency about the proceedings. A Brief Stay with the Living is far more typical of contemporary French, and indeed even of British fiction than it is of Darrieussecq's previous works. It is a short, melodramatic novel, if her longest to date, and it is slow-moving, almost sluggish.
Detail becomes mere data. None of the characters engage, never mind convince, although the youngest girl, Nore, has a lively intelligence. Jeanne, the eldest, lives in Argentina, and the middle girl, Annie, is unhappy in love and exists in Paris where life for her is about lamentation and calls home to a mother who can no longer help.
For all the ambition of its four-handed narrative, this half-hearted novel is submerged in its own diffidence. Curiously, it is also far more conventional than would be expected of the inspired author of Pig Tales, whose proven imagination and daring have suddenly become - and one hopes temporarily - earthbound.
Marie Darrieussecq will read next Saturday, June 14th at 1 p.m. in the Project Theatre, as part of the Dublin Writers' Festival
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
A Brief Stay with the Living. By Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Ian Monk, Faber, 190pp, £14.99