It should be noted from the outset that expressing one’s enthusiasm for a novel that reveals the back kitchens – sometimes unsavory – of the press and publishing is not without irony. Especially since its author collaborates on the book pages of L’Express, which will not help the reputation of our profession. But let’s assume: THE Little Pranksters is one of the successes of this literary season.
In the novels of Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld, we often come across outdated restaurants in the 16th arrondissement, impeccable musical references, ageless aristocrats and trendy young people, as well as a melancholy narrator, scion of an old French family, any resemblance to the author of which cannot be purely coincidental. Above all, his fictions are the repeated promise of having fun with the pretensions and false values of the time. The Little Pranksters – a direct reference to lost illusions de Balzac – does even better when it comes to ferocity and nostalgia.
At the start, as with Balzac, there is the friendship between two young poets. Henri d’Estissac and Paul Beuvron met at the beginning of the century, not in Angoulême, but in the hypokhâgne at Daniélou, on the heights of Rueil-Malmaison. One, Parisian, dunce and already disenchanted, swears by failures. The other, provincial, ambitious and brilliant, dreams of being a writer. Henri becomes a freelancer at Avant-gardethis penniless magazine specializing in “shady artists” and “even more improbable generational phenomena”, which owes a lot to Technikart (“We weren’t coming to Avant-garde to put his money aside, but to squander the desire to write that your twenties lend you”). Paul publishes an ambitious and erudite novel, but flops. another “nigger”, clandestine pen first for a champion of the bestseller eager to win literary stripes, then for a neo-feminist activist, a rapper prized by France Inter, and even ministers.
“Letter Bodybuilder”
Through these heirs of Lucien de Rubempré and Rastignac, Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld takes us through the Parisian human comedy, from the editorial schemes of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the nabobs of the Villa Montmorency. Behind the character of the mad publisher, Octave Marcillac, as Florentine maneuvers to boost sales and win literary prizes, we recognize some legends of the environment, from Bernard de Fallois to Jean-Claude Fasquelle. Much more cruel, the portrait of the successful author Patrick Rossi, “bodybuilder of letters”, king of “narrative arcs”, who considers himself a Jeff Koons of publishing, subcontracting the writing of his page-turners (“Since when should a writer write his books?”)
We advise against reading these Little Pranksters to any aspiring writer who still harbors some illusions about the world of letters. “In addition to being sensitive and proud of roosters, the writers are amazingly naive. If these turkeys knew behind the scenes, the editors who play with them as with disposable pawns, the critics who will never read their books and laugh at them behind their backs, their close friends who rant during dinners to which they are no longer invited” can we read. The novelist also pinpoints the epidemic of “class defectors”: “Difficult to do more demagogic. Even the heirs of the bank and the cinema claimed to be homeless. struggled to make ends meet.”
But Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld is not just the pitiless satirist of media hypocrisy and fashionable balloons. His novel also offers a magnificent requiem for youthful ideals, estranged friends (“we are only good for slowly but surely dissolving in our selfishness”) and mavericks. He thus pays a moving tribute to journalists who marked his beginnings in this profession, artists without work, great lords living like tramps, magnificent losers. Himself proves that you can be a “little prankster” and sign a great book.
The Little Pranksters, by Louis-Henri de la Rochefoucauld. Robert Laffont, 247 pages, €20. Release August 24.