Mount TBR #39

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

French title: Le Riche Homme

First published: 1970

Englished: Jean Stewart, 1971

The Rich Man – Georges Simenon

Neighborhood potentate Victor Lecoin is 45, the dangerous age for Simenonian protagonists, liable to losing their heads when change knocks on the door – or kicks the door in. Born poor, Victor has become the “rich man” of the locality through sheer hard work and the determination to lead his life as he sees fit. “You’re big, strong, and rich,” the madam of a homey brothel tells him, “What more do you want?”

A lot more, though he is so estranged from himself that he doesn’t realize it. Victor has the existential blues pretty bad and that’s not good. Losing his mother at age 6, he has grown up without any affection. He can’t talk to his father because born in about 1890 his father is of a generation that endures rather than speaks. He can’t talk to his brother because they are like oil and water, introvert and extrovert. He doesn’t make any effort to talk to the local guys so they don’t make any effort to talk to him. He married the local schoolmarm, but feels inferior to her because of his own lack of education. For a long time, he and his wife have been mere “associates” because they are never intimate. To appease his senses, so to speak, he goes on sprees of drinking and frequenting with professionals and easy-going amateurs.

Victor doesn’t realize how lonely he is until one day a new maid enters the house. Raised in an orphanage run by nuns, Alice is sixteen, a shy country girl and already the victim of sexual abuse by her previous employer. The local rubes, especially the female misogynists, blame her for “letting” her victimizer grope her. Victor - staring into a void that money, prosperity, land, health, and reputation can’t fill – loses his head, feeling strange feelings like the desire to become one, to fuse with her. Is this love? Or just confusion?

As in the other non-Maigret psychological whydunnits, the drama is tight: all the action is limited to two or three settings, to a few characters. I use the word “action” loosely since the plot does not advance at the whim of incidents or twists but by progressive slippage, almost insensible. We readers see the milieu, Victor’s narrow background, the cultural background of blaming and shaming and hurting women for their own victimization. Victor is thinking about getting his wife out of the way, but would he really do it? Little by little, we feel that all this will end badly and it only remains to be seen in what way, exactly, the bubble will pop ... and when it finally bursts, Simenon, as is his way, still manages to surprise us. The characters are utterly ordinary, their dreams trivial, their sins predictable, their cruelty banal, but their tragedy existential.

Simenon lived for many years in La Rochelle, a coastal city famous for fishing and mussels, and greatly appreciated the Vendée, in western France and known for its long coastline and sandy beaches. It is hardly surprising that he has set many of his novels in this beautiful region. This novel, written in Epalinges, Switzerland, dates from 1970, making it one of the last novels he wrote, before he decided to give up fiction for autobiography.