A Middle Class Person Reviews Debré

Name, the final installment of a trilogy of novels by Constance Debré, is out this week. These books piss me off and I have read each of them, cover to cover, without putting them down. Debré’s books are best summarized by adjectives alone: tight, fast, compulsive, cold. I would describe them as autofictional accounts of Debré’s rupture with her former posh life. She leaves her husband and her job as a lawyer to live a pared-back life in various studios around Paris, swim every morning, eat little, and fuck women. Dyke class traitor fiction would normally be high on my literary wish list, but I can’t help but feel that I am simply not the audience for them. I have finished each book thinking, “Ohhhh mon dieu tu n’as mangé qu’un macaron aujourd’hui? Devrions-nous le dire à tout le monde? Devrions-nous inviter Carla Bruni?”

They are “slim volumes” in every sense: intellectually, physically. Reading them, I feel as though a thin woman has been mean to me: “Maybe it started the first time I saw her naked… When I realized that she prefers things to people, not even the big things, but the small things, the most insignificant things. When I understood there was nothing she desired from the world. That’s when I thought, so that’s what a woman is, soft skin and stupidity… a bourgeois body, devoid of greatness, slightly dirty.” This passage, from Playboy, bubbles up out of contempt for her middle-class lover. Compare this derision to an exchange she has with a younger lover and family friend: “One day she asked me What class do we belong to? I said We’re the relegated upper class. Double or quits, darling. I’m not gay. Me too, me neither.” This internalized misogyny doesn’t read ironic or even knowing. What the narrator does know is condescension for those beneath her — and clearly, she’s a top. Men are like this, women are like that, c’est normal.

I was most interested in book two of the trilogy, Love Me Tender, which follows the narrator’s struggle to see her son against the wishes of her spiteful ex-husband who got a judge to give him full custody and then fought to keep her away from him on the grounds that she would “speak to her son about homosexuality.” There’s a fascinating tension between the narrator’s monastic devotion to sexual deviancy and the juridical reality of a bourgeois country that would rather not speak of such things in front of the children. While not finding the books particularly provocative otherwise, I was, indeed, shocked that this happened to the narrator (and Debré herself). Watching the former public defender lower herself to the supplicant’s position is not as solidarity-forming as I would hope (she remains condescending towards those caught in the French legal system), but it does inspire her to live leaner, to give up more and more. 

Debré is for family abolition. She wants to get rid of the reign of parents and liberate children, which I appreciated, though I thought her comparison of childhood to slavery and incarceration un peu de trop. “I am against patrimony, I am against having a domicile, a nationality, I am in favor of eliminating the état civil of your name,” she avers. Constance, I have incredible news about the rising tide of fascism, the threat most of your neighbors already live under. 

Name is supposed to be a disavowal of the family name. Her grandfather was the first prime minister of the Fifth Republic, and she will remind you that periodically through the book. She’s also the child of addicts: a mother who has already passed, a father who dies throughout the novel. She concludes, “I would have written the same book with any other parents. With any other childhood. With any other name. I would still have the same thing to say. That you have to escape. From wherever, however. Escape.” Maybe so — I can see people nodding along to this monologue at Al-Anon. And maybe I understand her, too, in the end. I talk about my parents just like she did, as if I’m telling you about myself, about how my parents didn’t go to college, about how my mother grew up poor, how she smokes Newports, about my grandparents, about the addicts and suicides. The middle class can also self-fashion.

Are my criticisms personal? Am I reviewing these novels as if I were instead speaking cattily about a person I know personally? Maybe. There are moments here, between the “I don’t care about anything and one day I will slap a homeless person if they ask me for anything” passages and the passages where she admits she does care, cares so much she wants to betray all of it and would rather die than live a lie. Yes, she hates the manners that she cannot shake: “I hate them because they are ingrained in my body, deeper than my blood, they are more than a language, they are a body, they are my body that allows me to recognize other bodies like mine and those which are not, which annoy me with their poor-people’s anxieties, their poor people’s complexes, their blunders, their vulgar way of being obsessed with class, with their poor-people’s taste and their belief in good taste… that it is only poor people who talk about money, who talk about food.” While I have empathy, if not a lot of patience, for the self-hating haute bourgeoisie, I must protest that no one obsesses over the rich like the rich do.

Or maybe it just pissed me off to see her on the cover of Book Forum dressed like Genet, bald head, sleeves rolled, defiant stare. Nothing she’s written comes close to matching the radical solidarity he finds with the dispossessed or his erotic provocations in daring to betray his cause by loving a fascist, because Genet knows what Debré doesn’t, can’t, or won’t: that the differences between us are so slight, thinner than a slender volume of anhedonic prose. —Natalie Adler