The incipit sets the tone: “My name is Martin Faubert and you are not reading an essay on happy sobriety or the power of positive thoughts that are just waiting to arise from you. I’m really not in the mood right now.” Fans of Natacha Calestrémé, move on. The narrator of Alternative medicine is a general practitioner at the end of his rope, who has his own sense of his profession: he charges his patients according to his mood, sometimes nothing, sometimes 150 euros when these annoying people come to complain about their HPI children.
Hippocrates must be turning in his grave – and this is only the beginning. One day a certain Aurore Rosier enters Doctor Faubert’s office, with whom the doctor falls in love. He prescribes tests and, with the complicity of a laboratory technician friend of his, diagnoses him with… syphilis. Aurore doesn’t understand: she has never cheated on her husband. So he was the one who was unfaithful! The husband in turn falls into the trap of false analyses, he admits to an adulterous affair with a student and the scheme works perfectly: Aurore asks for a divorce and falls into the arms of Doctor Faubert. On this boulevard theater argument, Nicolas Rey constructs a diabolical plot, which would not have displeased Sacha Guitry…
That Rey puts himself in the shoes of a doctor, that’s not lacking in salt. If there’s anyone we wouldn’t trust with our health, it’s him. In 2010, the former cocaine addict told A slight slump his detoxification treatment. At the age when others ran marathons or practiced hip-hop dancing, he had ceramic hips fitted. At least he knows the medical staff (nurses, addictologists, psychiatrists) inside out, having spent a good part of his life in consultation. The delusional doctor he portrays here is hilarious, especially when he in turn falls into cocaine (up to four grams per day). But Alternative medicine is not not just a farce. Rey pushes the envelope of immoralism very far. The ambiguous (although chaste) relationship that Faubert maintains with Justine, Aurore’s daughter, is reminiscent of the film Stepfather by Bertrand Blier. At one point, we are on the verge of closing the book. Except that Rey, decidedly clever (in every sense of the word), makes fun of us, and we will see that this Justine had an equally Machiavellian plan to get Faubert out of his mother’s life…
“Nicolas Rey is his own worst enemy”
We know that Rey owes his beginnings to Franz-Olivier Giesbert who, having read Thirteen minutes upon its release in 1998, had fallen for this “prince of the dilapidated and self-deprecating, son of Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Frédéric Beigbeder”. FOG had hired him at Figaro, then as a television columnist, where Rey’s mischievous spirit hit the mark. The enfant terrible of letters, Flore prize in the year 2000 for Short memory, then drank the cup, becoming a mixture of Mickey Rourke and Peter Doherty. At least we can’t blame him for being a careerist. From time to time, when you no longer expect it, it bounces back. In 2014, then in a relationship with Emma Luchini, he co-wrote and co-directed with her The Woman from Rio, an excellent film in which he also plays the main role, and for which he won the César for best short film. He could have continued the scenarios, but he didn’t persevere. His lifeline remains literature, even if his novels are uneven. Love is declared (2012), Children who lie will not go to heaven (2016) and Back against the wall (2018) were held together by their charm. Letters to Josephine (2019) and The Margin of Error (2021), too sloppy, bordered on disaster.
So much so that we had ignored Unlimited credit (2022). FOG, again, was right when he said: “Nicolas Rey is his own worst enemy: he takes himself so little seriously that good criticism is easily overlooked.” In an environment where vanity is the norm, Rey’s nonchalance is refreshing. Alas, apart from his old comrade Beigbeder, who chronicles each of his novels in Le Figaro Magazine, all the criticism dropped him. An honest reader can only recognize Rey’s talent, and salute his brilliance, which his more serious colleagues who publish in more chic houses than Au Diable Vauvert will never have. If we were to give you a prescription, we would prescribe Alternative medicine : laughing with this sick Rey does the greatest good.
Alternative medicine
By Nicolas Rey.
Au Diable Vauvert 280 p., €20.
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