Today, an important writer is not or no longer only a great literary or narrative practitioner; it is above all a kind of influencer of letters and ideas, able to feed on the spirit of the times and transcribe it in the form of texts that make people react. Novelist, icon of feminism and polemicist, Virginie Despentes unquestionably belongs to this category of authors. His novel Dear asshole sucks in all the tension of the literary season and all paths converge towards it. We can say of this novel that it is the perfect work of 2022; that is to say, essentially, the one about which one wants to speak and write. This is a novel that triggers an immediate desire to debate. His favorite themes could all be the subject of a current affairs talk show: #MeToo, sexuality, addictions, social networks, masculinism, friendship, aging, parenthood, online activism, sexism in culture. Dear asshole is a book by book clubthese discussion sessions between passionate readers who share their visions of the same book during a snack or dinner.
Dear asshole is a more nuanced but also gentler novel than the media character played by Virginie Despentes would suggest. It is a story with multiple points of view, taking up the epistolary genre by adapting it to contemporary communication tools: essentially correspondence by e-mail. The triple point of view gives the novel its interest: the culprit of harassment who is at the center of the plot is a shy and addictive writer who only realizes in retrospect what his behavior may have been “problematic “. Symmetrically, his accuser, a press officer turned influential feminist blogger is a victim who, by her growing influence, inspires fear in her former stalker. Often, we find in the writings of Zoé Katana, the feminist activist, lines that could have been written by Despentes in his viral forums – for example, the domination of the white man of power who hides behind each shot of each French cinema movie…
The generational angle is one of the most interesting in Dear asshole, in particular through the encounter between two female characters. That of Despentes for Rebecca, the actress and former sex symbol who becomes politically aware as her age keeps her away from castings; that of the young feminist guard for Zoé Katana, the woke blogger at war with everyone whose viral posts end up costing her her sanity.
Woke against scruffy
However, we cannot reduce Dear asshole to the novel of feminist deconstruction, even if it is from this angle that the reader enters the Despentes universe. The book is also a literary and (sometimes too) political reflection on the culture of celebrity, the fear of no longer being loved, on loneliness and on this persistent desire to self-destruct in a society that advocates health, success and well-being. His characters, alcoholics or addicts to hard drugs, frequent narcotics anonymous. The insistence around the nihilistic high sounds very punk of the 1980s and we sometimes want to oppose this accumulation of substances and anecdotes of dealers with: “Ok generation X” as some let go of “Ok boomer”.
Despentes’ original line, which could be summed up as “neither patriarchy, nor yoga, nor quinoa”, places the novelist in a space somewhere between Michel Houellebecq and a radical queer artist. One of the paradoxes of the media coverage of Dear asshole is that its author’s countercultural aura and status as a punk icon became the book’s selling pitch, a supreme irony that sees the reviled market in the novel’s pages make its creator’s provocations a headline argument. gondola in Fnac and Relay stores. I found in the novel by Despentes bridges with the non-fictional work by Brett Easton Ellis published in France in 2019, White : the great American novelist of the 1990s comes from the same counter-culture, shares his interest in drugs of all types and a curiosity for the generation that immediately follows him, that of Y and other Z who took power on the networks social issues and renewed militancy and public speaking.
Where Ellis has become an assumed scruffy writer, worrying about the excesses of political correctness, Virginie Despentes obviously leans largely on the side of woke software but the two authors have in common to focus on issues related to ethnic, sexual and political minorities and the way in which their presence redefines a public space from which they were until recently largely excluded.