Saturday, April 6, 2019

Back to the Classics #6

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge.

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.

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