"Hate: A Romance" by Tristan Garcia

Hate: A Romance is told from the perspective of a journalist named Elizabeth who spends the best years of her life writing pieces for magazines in Paris. This is how she describes it early in the book:

“I covered ‘culture,’ that is, everything and nothing. I had my little supplement. I went out, I kept up with the scene. Television was my first beat. It’s how everyone starts out. I’d go hear shows, indie rock shows, to compensate for the shit I watched on TV. I did trend pieces, I wrote up the latest thing. It leaves a funny taste in your mouth. You smell death in the life all around you, and all the while you keep waiting for something new. I did ‘fashion,’ too, naturally, and ‘books’ every now and then. If we were sitting across a dinner table and you asked me, I could tell you what people were talking about; I couldn’t tell you how much else, but I knew what was current.”

Holy moly. At the end of the chapter she drops this:

“In this world some people are distinct individuals while others are no more than paths of transmission. At my age, the signs are unmistakable: I belong in category two. I have my work cut out for me.”

Hate: A Romance, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing in translation this fall, is by Tristan Garcia, but you’re meant to regard it as having been written by Elizabeth. That’s the frame: Elizabeth has written a historical account of what was happening in Paris during the 1990s and early 2000s and that is the book we’re reading. It’s to Garcia’s credit that one barely thinks about him — or the translators, for that matter — while reading it.

The book is Elizabeth’s memoir, sort of, except that it’s not really about her, but three of her friends— the dangerously charming punk William Miller, the conservative intellectual Jean-Michel Liebowitz, and the AIDS prevention activist Dominique Rossi — and how they destroyed each other’s lives. These three guys, in Elizabeth’s telling, are historical figures: separately and together, they were responsible for shaping their era. They captured people’s attention. People cared what they thought.

William is the magical genius in Elizabeth’s universe, her favorite by far. They meet when they’re about 20 years old because she wants to do a story on him. At this early stage, he is an inarticulate, shy gutter punk who wanders around muttering about all the projects he is planning. Elizabeth befriends him and stands by his side as he transforms — unconsciously, of course — into an icon worshipped by “somewhat marginal people.” William turns himself into a careening spectacle: a glamorous, inscrutable figure who rails against AIDS prevention activists for trying to talk him and all other young men into giving up their freedom, a.k.a. using condoms. When William, a master bullshit artist, writes a book and achieves a new level of fame, “Technikart and most of the magazines and ‘avant-garde’ fanzines hailed the emergence of a new voice.”

Dominique is one of Elizabeth’s colleagues early in life — the two of them covered nightlife together and interviewed famous people. At the beginning of the book, she introduces him to William, thus setting off the pair’s five year turn as an “old-fashioned couple.” During this time, more and more people start dying of AIDS, and Dominique, who is HIV positive, gradually trades in his glamorous, old life as a club kid for a consuming role as a community organizer who promotes safe sex. After he and William break up, they become bitter enemies, both obsessed with making sure the other one and everything he stands for is forgotten by history.

There is a third friend, Jean-Michel Liebowitz, whom Elizabeth dates on and off for about a decade while William and Dominique carry on their war.  Liebowitz is a professor of strong convictions who begins his life on the left but finds himself, as he gets older, taking unmistakably conservative positions. He rails against cultural relativism, pop music, promiscuity, and what he perceives as the left’s knee-jerk affection for any and all minorities. He is a public intellectual; he writes books for the popular press and appears on television. But he considers himself a philosopher, and as we learn early on, he has contempt for Elizabeth’s line of work. “He was always going on about the unfashionable, the ‘nonmodern,’ the old days,” Elizabeth recalls. She stands for the opposite of all those things, she knows: “each new fad supplanting the last.” Liebowitz makes fun of her sometimes, saying that when finally his books became fashionable, she’ll have no choice but to embrace his views because it’s all she is “programmed” to do.

Elizabeth has her own disdain for journalists. At one point she makes fun of the credulity with which feature writers and critics respond to William’s unserious, self-promotional book. Elsewhere she laments not being able to talk to Liebowitz because she is “not an intellectual.” Still, you never get the sense that she ever takes any of that stuff much to heart. She knows from the beginning how Liebowitz feels about her work, but it doesn’t make her want to do it any less. This is significant insofar as her book — again, we are pretending Hate is her book — amounts to a long, expertly paced magazine piece, one written by an attentive, well-sourced journalist who has great affection for her subjects. Though there’s plenty of first person in the book, it’s essentially a reported history, complete with interviews and scenes and props and anecdotes — killer devices, all, which come from a playbook that you don’t often see being used in novels. Tristan Garcia has applied the storytelling techniques native to fun, middlebrow journalism and used them to tell a fictional story. The framing device — ”this is a book written by a journalist” — is not just an excuse; it actually informs the book’s style.

In the introduction, Elizabeth says she has written the book for William — to rescue him from obscurity and to correct the conventional wisdom that he was never anything but a vapid, reckless buffoon who deliberately gave people AIDS in order to get attention. But William’s memory is not the only thing being rescued in Hate. The other is journalism: Elizabeth, for all her cynicism about the profession, has written an immersive and deeply felt piece of magazine writing. It is a story about ideas told through the people who had them, and the emotions, grudges, and ambitions that informed the things they believed and wrote. Typical gossip for intellectuals, in other words. Also, a decisive defense of the form.

The book is about death, too, and what happens to people who spend their lives trying to be influential when they’re no longer able to make noise — how their mark on the world is registered, remembered, and above all forgotten. William cuts right to the heart of it when his book of nonsense is published to rave reviews and Elizabeth says to him, “Not bad, Will, you’re a writer now.” “No, Liz,” Will answers. “You don’t get it at all. I’m a motherfucking text.”

Elizabeth does get it though, and she knows what she’s doing when, barely 30 pages into the book, she quotes an aging Dominique looking back on the “joie-de-vivre” of gay life before AIDS. “When you’re defining your own era, you’re not aware of it, you think you’re building a future,” Dominique says. “Then one day you realize that this future you’re building is just something that people will look back on one day as the past, as something past and gone. That’s what it means to live out an era, a time, a moment. All of a sudden — yes — it ends.”

Last week I wrote about two French novels that have been translated recently into English: Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03, which was published last month, and Tristan Garcia’s Hate, A Romance, which is scheduled to come out in November. Both books are published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and both take place in late 20th century France. They share an unusual origin story — two editors at FSG teamed up to edit and publish them after one brought the originals home from a trip to Paris — and I initially thought it would make sense to write about them side by side.

After looking hard for common ground beyond the circumstantial, I decided I couldn’t disagree with FSG editor Mitzi Angel — the translator of 03 and the publisher of Hate — when she told me in an e-mail that stylistically, at least, the two books are like “chalk and cheese.” So better, I think, to treat each one separately. Valtat’s this week; Garcia’s next.

03 above all is plotless: nothing happens on any of its 84 pages, which add up not to a story but a swirling internal monologue delivered by a tense young man who is infatuated with a mentally challenged girl in his town. It’s unclear how old the narrator is when he’s describing his crush — the back of the book says vaguely that the ordeal is being “remembered years later” — but the action, such as it is, takes place during the ’80s, while he’s in the 12th grade. His preoccupation with the girl develops over many mornings spent waiting for his bus to school and watching her intently while she waits for hers across the street.

Over the course of the one long paragraph that comprises 03, the bratty, nerdy narrator investigates the texture of his unlikely attraction to the girl, imagining what it’s like to be her and trying to figure out why he finds her so appealing. In the process he explains proudly how different he is from his peers in the suburbs of Paris and how much smarter he is than the grown-ups who tell him what to do. Basically, he’s a disgruntled teenager: a cynical and resolutely independent adolescent who listens to The Cure and Joy Division, who takes pride in seeing through societal norms, and who boasts of possessing an intelligence that is “determined to reject everything around it.” He makes jokes using skeptical scare quotes the way Hipster Runoff does, and the cold, proud knowingness with which he regards the world calls to mind Tao Lin. He is very impressed with how clearly he sees through the bullshit everyone else around him falls for, and he cherishes what he thinks of as his hard-won maturity.

The girl across the street looks to this charmer like someone living a real life — a human animal more free than him because she is unencumbered by the exhausting calculations that govern every one of his thoughts and feelings. At one point, he defensively rejects the idea that there’s such a thing as “spontaneous feelings,” which he believes are always “the outcome of long and involved tactical maneuvers.” That being the case, he reasons, why not try to “act as conscious, as deliberately, and therefore forcefully as possible”?

He admits toward the beginning that he is “drawn to her precisely for the chance to love a beauty that had no self-awareness and of which, consequently, I alone would be the sole and watchful guardian.” It’s an icky thought process, but you get the idea pretty quickly that this guy’s only really interested in the girl insofar as sizing up her deformities helps him understand his own. Toward the end of the book he comes right out and says it: “I wanted to turn her into an allegory for my own failings.”

A tiresome fellow, all told. But Valtat — who has written a new book in English called Aurorama that’s being published by Melville House this month — renders the character with force, invoking ideas and memories that are muscular enough in their specificity that following along with the narrator’s scattered thoughts is riveting, even if spending an hour with someone so salty and stunted is not your idea of a good time. You wonder as you read this book how, if, this wreck of a boy will change as he grows older. That you’re rooting for Valtat’s baby monster at the end of this unattractive stream of consciousness is a testament to the verve and precision with which the author built him.

"Exes" by Jean-Christophe Valtat

Lorin Stein, the newly installed editor of the Paris Review, discovered Jean-Christophe Valtat while wandering around in the Gallimard bookstore in Paris back in 2008. Mr. Stein, then an editor at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, had been having lunch with a French publisher and the book critic for the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. Afterward he asked the critic to take him to a bookstore and tell him what to read. “She showed me some books but I’d heard of them,” Mr. Stein said by phone on Friday. “Then she went to work, and I was by myself. I was just killing time and I saw a book called Exes. I thought that was a good title so I pulled it down.”

The author of Exes was Mr. Valtat, whom Mr. Stein had never heard of and who was not particularly well-known in France. There was another book of his on the shelf, this one considerably shorter and enigmatically titled 03. Mr. Stein bought them both and packed them for New York.

The editor tracked down a third book while he was in Paris as well, this one a French bestseller by Tristan Garcia called La Meilleure Part Des Hommes. One of Mr. Stein’s colleagues at FSG, Mitzi Angel, had heard good things and asked him to get her a copy.

When he got back to New York, Mr. Stein presented Ms. Angel, who runs her own imprint at FSG, with both 03 and La meilleure part des hommes. She loved both, and not long after, an agreement was struck; she would translate the Valtat volume into English for him, and he would translate the Garcia for her.

“I only later realized just how crazily difficult it was,” Ms. Angel said in an email. “But it was fun: we ended up editing each other, which was interesting, and not usually something that happens in a publishing house.”

“We would go into each other’s offices and we would show each other a hard sentence and then we would both start riffing — just coming up with different solutions,” Mr. Stein said, adding that at a certain point in the process he approached FSG’s French-speaking foreign rights director Marion Duvert for help, and enlisted her as a co-translator.

The two books are radically different in style and plot. Valtat’s 03, which was published last month by FSG as a paperback original, takes the form of a hypnotically tense internal monologue delivered by a young man who has become infatuated with a mentally ill girl who lives near in his neighborhood; La meilleure part, according to Ms. Angel, which will be published through her Faber & Faber imprint of FSG in September as Hate: A Romance, is “about the end of politics in the ’80s and ’90s and what that means for a bunch of intellectuals and their sex lives.”

“Both books are set in the ’80s and share some preoccupations: the synthetic feel of that decade; the lack of commitment or engagement or sense of purpose; the sense that something might have been irretrievably lost,” Ms. Angel said.

Look for a side by side look at both books here next week.

Simon Rich’s debut novel, Elliot Allagash, is about a young well-intentioned nerd named Seymour who tricks and cheats his way to high school popularity and an exemplary academic record.  When a diabolical and endlessly wealthy new classmate — the Elliot Allagash who gives the book its name — decides to become Seymour’s ally, he turns the geek’s life around — just to see if he’s powerful and clever enough to do it. In the end — and this spoils very little about this hilarious, tightly wound story — Seymour is caught, and the life Elliott has so athletically built for him unravels.

The book came out at a funny moment, mere days after a 23-year-old named Adam Wheeler was kicked out of Harvard for allegedly faking a tall pile of academic credentials, including his SAT scores and his high school transcripts, and trying to grift his way to a Rhodes scholarship. Though Wheeler has entered a not guilty plea, he has already been publicly humiliated and his life has been placed on hold indefinitely while the evidence is evaluated.

While Elliot Allagash has far from a happy ending, the story trails off in a way that suggests that hope and love will overpower what would initially appear to be Seymour’s unfathomable, devastating disgrace. Though most everyone is laughing and cherishing their angle on his tailspin, there are people who are willing to protect him until the storm passes. One starts to see how even trouble as grave as what Adam Wheeler got himself into is survivable. Not to be all “kids these days,” but considering how many times they’ve watched it happen at this point, online and on their TVs, the young readers this YA book is being marketed to must be absolutely terrified of the sort of media-driven ruin Seymour suffers in this book, and for that reason Elliot Allagash is a relavant story for them, and everyone else, to be reading right now.

The story of Adam Wheeler lines up so well with the one Rich has written for Seymour that one wonders whether the accused con boy had an Elliot Allagash holding his hand and egging him on throughout all of his apparent deceptions. It’s a horrifying thing, to imagine yourself in his position, and without giving too much away, it’s exactly what you get at the end of Rich’s book, wherein all the lies and manipulations Seymour has carried out over the course of his four-year friendship with Elliot are exposed — first on a television show, then in newspapers around the country — and his once-promising future is suddenly, cruelly erased. “They’re going to be mean to me,” little Seymour says, shortly after his world comes apart and he goes into hiding, in what is just one of many air-tight, on-point renderings of nightmarish fear that appear in the book. Is this not definitely how Wheeler felt when he got the first indication that his jig was up?

Elliot Allagash is a superb novel, not just good-naturedly funny but emotionally gripping, thanks to the bewildering swiftness with which Rich knows how to build characters and establish dynamics between them. The young author — also a Saturday Night Live writer who, full disclosure, is going to be appearing at a reading I’m hosting next month — gives backstory in places where he could have been forgiven for skipping it entirely but does so economically and unobtrusively so that it feels natural, rather than dutiful. Seymour changes slowly even though the book takes two hours to read, as does the fragile friendship between him and the omnipotent, genie-like Elliot. Finally it’s about one boy giving up on another that will leave you happily sure that, should you ever screw up as badly as Seymour (or Adam Wheeler) did, there will always be someone in your life who won’t give up on you.