LITERARY CRITICISM: MAX McGUINNESSreviews The Last Genet: A Writer in RevoltBy Hadrien Laroche Arsenal Pulp Press, 343pp. $22.95

JEAN GENET was something of a late developer when it came to politics. Throughout his literary heyday, in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, when contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus were engrossed in the ideological debates of the cold war, Genet remained largely aloof as he concentrated on producing a series of novels and plays, such as The Miracle of the Roseand The Balcony, which arguably surpassed them all in terms of originality and daring. Calls to add his signature to the endless round of petitions and manifestoes went unheeded. Then came May '68, when Genet was nearly 60 and had largely abandoned literature, which set off an extraordinary period of constant political activism (but very little writing) until his death, in 1986.

This is what Hadrien Laroche, recently appointed cultural and scientific counsellor at the French embassy in Dublin, calls "the last Genet", noting in his introduction that "the lastalso signifies the lowest, the way we speak of the lowestof the low". For Genet's political passion in these years focused on three rather questionable causes: the Black Panther Party, Germany's Red Army Faction and the Palestinians' guerrilla struggle against Israel. Over the course of The Last GenetLaroche gradually unfolds the sometimes sinister implications of the author's involvement in these movements, which seems to have derived from a combination of their aesthetic appeal, drugs, sexual desire and genuine indignation, but also from some unresolved prejudices of his own.

Genet's activism went far beyond the usual demands of fellow travelling. Leonard Bernstein may have thrown the odd cocktail party in honour of the Black Panthers, but Genet, who had done time for theft in his youth, toured the US for weeks, making speeches on behalf of the organisation's imprisoned leader, Bobby Seale. Ultimately, he wrote a manifesto in which he proclaimed that "to help save the blacks, I am calling for crime, for the assassination of whites". Among the more surprising signatories to this incendiary epistle was Jacques Derrida, who supervised Laroche's doctoral thesis, which formed the basis for The Last Genet, originally published in French in 1997.

Genet’s commitment to the Palestinians was even more emphatic, and he spent months at a time living in their refugee camps. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 he was on hand to witness the aftermath of the Shatila massacre, recording the carnage with grim precision: “The first corpse I saw was that of a 50- or 60-year-old man. He would have had a ring of white hair if a wound (an axe blow, it seemed to me) had not split open his skull. Part of the blackened brain was on the ground next to this head. The entire body lay in a sea of black, clotted blood”.

Genet clearly deserves credit for drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians at a time when broad sympathy for their cause was more limited than it is today, but, as Laroche reveals, some of his writings on the subject carried unmistakably anti-Semitic overtones. He also dredges up some passages from one of Genet’s early novels that express a perverse admiration for Hitler, who is described as a poet. In all this Laroche can be commended for scrupulously outlining the political context of “the last Genet” without letting him off the hook.

He is, however, occasionally guilty of the kind of whimsical absurdity that gives deconstruction a bad name. For instance, he seizes on a reference in one of Genet’s articles to a “member of the Black September in Munich, wearing a black hood”. Granted, Genet thought and wrote a lot about gay sex, but it is still ridiculous for Laroche to conclude from this that “the last image is transparent: a black . . . member wearing a hood. The event is only an erection”.

Laroche also writes the kind of high-flown, Derrida-inflected prose that does not translate easily into English. Readers may thus puzzle over statements such as, "His laughter must still be echoing in his casket and in the book that tells the story, trampled by the dancers." But overall, notwithstanding such moments of dissonance, The Last Genetis a measured reflection on how a literary genius seemed to lose the plot in his final years.

Max McGuinness is a faculty fellow in French and Romance philology at Columbia University

Hadrien Laroche is one of the moderators at the Franco-Irish Literary Festival this weekend at Dublin Castle and the Alliance Française; francoirishliteraryfestival.com/2011