Une vie française by Jean-Paul Dubois
Intrigued by its title and encouraged by the enthusiastic recommendation of the owner of my local (socialist!) bookshop this was one of the books I took with me on holiday. The bold title presupposes an exemplary quality; the life it narrates is everyman’s (and I use the term deliberately), the author has measured the pulse of an era. In this respect I am reminded both of Balzac – who at least acknowledged that his portrait of an era was the work of a lifetime and not just one book – and also of Philip Roth in ‘American Pastoral’. However, where Roth’s books seem almost effortlessly to exceed their scope to touch both on a particular era and on the rawer aspects of the human experience Dubois’s novel is not quite up to the task.
The novel takes as it chapter headings the terms of office of the various Presidents of the Fifth Republic, presumably in order to situate the protagonist within the common narrative. However, as the novel progresses and the characters’ lives take over, these political intrusions seem increasingly contrived (especially given that our hero is proud of his record of total electoral abstention). Most interesting to me however is the idea that politics of this sort (not events as such but a succession of figures and elections) might be seen as providing a unifying structure in French common life (whether or not they actually do). And what, for Dubois, are the qualities of the archetypal French life? A drifting aimlessness, self-absorption, the inevitable recuperation and failure of all subsersive acts, depression. And enough self-awareness to find this state of affairs alternately funny and very distressing.
Despite all this, the novel is an agreeable, moving, and on occasions very funny read. It reveals less about the status of contemporary history in French collective self-understanding than I had hoped it might. Instead it tells us more about the pretensions of a certain type of writer who believes his/her voice to be universal. For in the end what Dubois gives us is just that, a French life, no more or less interesting or worthy of attention than any other French life. However, the brash self-assurance of his framing devices suggests that he imagined himself to be doing something rather more.
