Classic Novella.
Like the Maigret novels, Simenon’s non-Maigret psychological thrillers are
always shorter than 180 pages long, enough for an evening or longish ride on bus or plane. In
Simenon’s ‘hard novels’ one of life’s ordinary crises (illness, accident,
crime, moving, family members forgetting one’s birthday, etc.) motivates a protagonist
to evaluate his life due to the resultant existential heebie-jeebies. Sometimes
he is middle-aged, sometimes she is just entering adulthood. The moods of these
novels are somber, the tone clinical, the language plain.
The Nightclub (L'âne rouge) – Georges Simenon (tr. Jean Stewart)
This early novel, published in 1933 when Simenon was only
30, stars a young man of 19. Jean Cholet is the beneficiary of blessings such
as an intact family, a petty bourgeois life in the coastal city of Nantes, a job
as a cub reporter for the local Catholic paper, with prospects for advancement.
But the city, like lots of ports, offers plenty of the usual temptations to
unbalance a youth who is not ready to exercise judgment because his teen-aged
brain is literally too young to manage impulses or responsibility.
One fateful evening Cholet pushes open the doors of The
Red Donkey, a shabby bar where Lulu d'Artois sings her tiny little heart out. His
amygdala blends love and lust and narcissism and grandiosity’s need for
admiration, driving him to blow through money to stand drinks and bed the born
to lose Lulu. Fragile and stunted, she’s tells him she is “sick” but chooses to
be vague as to whether the malady is TB or VD.
Cholet stumbles home reeking of cut-rate liqueurs and
cheap floozy, both of which his mother smells on him and berates him with equal
measures of scorn and fear for his soul and future. His father looks at him with wry expressions that alternate between indulgent regret and jealous
admiration. His contact on the police beat doesn’t give details, but warns him
to watch his step with the dodgy people who run The Red Donkey.
The job is also a hassle. It’s a stuffy provincial newspaper,
after all, with troublesome deadlines and constant cry for copy, leading to
making up reports about events never attended by the cub reporter. Cholet
suffocates with employees he feels superior to, as he sees them as churls. He
sexually harasses and assaults the lonely unloved Berthe, treating her like an
object.
Lulu goes back to Paris to live with her aunt. Cholet
follows her without a franc in his pocket. Out of work, he stalks the streets,
bored and hungry and thinking what a mess he’s in. But a crisis calls him home
to Nantes where he realizes he can’t proceed in the cul-de-sac he has driven
himself into. This baby step in assuming responsibility is about as optimistic a note
as we ever find in Simenon hard novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment