FICTION: Hate: A RomanceBy Tristan Garcia, translated by Marion Duvert and Lorin Stein Faber and Faber, 272pp. £12.99
WHAT A STRANGE and haunting novel. The clue, I suppose, is in the title. It’s a study of hate, and yet it is a romance, of sorts. The narrator, Elizabeth Levallois, has for two decades loved, in her own way, three men who variously hated themselves and each other. Her narrative, essentially, is an examination of what she has been left with after investing her time in these men and, by extension, what we have been left with after investing our time in these decades, the 1990s and the early 21st century. “When you’re defining your own era, you’re not aware of it, you think you’re building a future,” Elizabeth says. “All of a sudden – yes – it ends. And it ended badly.
Hate: A Romancesketches the lives of these four people, linking those lives loosely with the fall of the political left and the rise of the right. William Miller is a lost soul. He declares himself an artist but doesn't make art. When Elizabeth meets him he is living on the street. His beauty saves him. Dominique Rossi is a political activist. He started off with communism in his birthplace of Corsica, then graduated to gay rights when he moved to Paris. Jean-Michel Leibovitz is a left-wing intellectual who becomes a right-wing intellectual, believing that "intelligence had gotten mixed up with a cowardly totalitarian political correctness, a habit of saying yes to anyone who'd been oppressed". He publishes a book on the subject of fidelity but has a mistress for 10 years. Elizabeth Levallois, our narrator, is his mistress. She is an arts journalist who is unable to make up her mind whether to have a child. In the end, time makes up its mind for her.
The novel opens at a very particular moment: Aids has arrived in the West and begun picking off members of the gay community. Dominique describes how the 1980s in Paris were “our sixties. It was sexual liberation”. One big party. But by the end of the 1980s “everyone I used to know was dead . . . Everyone. It was winter. They faded away so fast. You noticed the first signs, they developed that look, and you could tell they were taken by surprise, they couldn’t hold on, and then what? It was already over. A hospital visit, then the cemetery”.
Elizabeth introduces Dominique to William, and they become lovers for five years. They both contract HIV and part on very bad terms. This is where the hate sets in.
Dominique takes up the safe-sex cause. William campaigns for the right of homosexual men to have unprotected sex. In a particularly upsetting scene William’s latest lover pleads with him to give him the disease. William obliges. He has found his calling. He goes on to organise what he calls “conversion parties” across Paris in which “guys who are positive get together with guys who are negative and want to be fertilized”.
These sensationalist aspects generated controversy when the novel was published in France, in 2008. Garcia, then 27, was awarded the Prix de Flore that year. Michel Houellebecq is a previous winner, and similarities between the two writers are not difficult to spot: both combine an examination of social and sexual mores with a philosophical bent. Unlike Houellebecq, however, Garcia is never seedy, never graphic. The narrative saddens as the characters grow isolated. Ranks close, ladders are drawn up. And then one of them dies. And he dies well; he dies bravely. In his dying he redeems himself. But when he’s gone Elizabeth realises she is on her own.
Hate: A Romanceis a portrait of people who cannot find peace, who are driven by their ego, by their need for attention and, of course, by hate. Garcia writes finely, understatedly, never losing sight of the damning detail or overplaying his hand. As a meditation on the past two decades, Hateis poignant and illuminating. This is an exciting, original and defiant debut by a young writer who shows every sign of becoming a major literary voice.
Garcia has set himself a difficult task. Elizabeth is a bystander, in her own life, as much as in the lives of the three men. The characters are no longer on speaking terms by the time the novel is about a third in. Therefore the novel becomes a reported novel. The action does not happen on the page but is reported to Elizabeth, who reports it to the reader. “In this world,” she says, “some people are distinct individuals while others are no more than paths of transmission. At my age, the signs are unmistakeable: I belong in category two.” It’s a difficult narrative device to pull off. But Garcia manages it.
Claire Kilroy's most recent novel is All Names Have Been Changed
