Tanguy Viel: La Disparition de Jim Sullivan (2013)

Ah, France's love of America! It's evident from the number of books translated into French, the number of Americans invited onto La Grande Librairie – and almost always having to speak through interpretation: what exactly do English or American writers have against learning French? And didn't the great philosopher Sartre love American cartoons, and isn't a French writer setting a novel in the USA almost bound to be translated (meaning potentially massive sales, if not turned into a Hollywood film?) The megabucks that could flow in!

Well, La Disparition de Jim Sullivan isn't quite like that, but it's about a novel being made with an American setting, only that novel isn't quite the novel La Disparition de Jim Sullivan. It's about possibilities, shoulds and coulds, some of which don't appear in the theoretical novel, although they do in the real La Disparition de Jim Sullivan. So what is this? Not, then, we're given to believe, the novel we're reading here, which is on the one hand the author's musing about his novel, on the other hand the novel itself at the same time. So the novel we're reading, what's it about?

There are certainly (intended) clichéd main protagonists' names such as Dwayne Koster and his wife Susan, Susan's lover Alex Dennis, and then of course the waitress Milly Hartway, Dwayne's lover until he learns of her playing in porn movies and burns the video store down, but then he is of course deeply disturbed, perhaps suffering from post-traumatic war syndrome even though he's not actually left the USA, but then that's another story.

Jim Sullivan's story is yet another: he was a prominent singer who just disappeared in the desert in the 1970s, someone whose songs and story Dwayne is fascinated by, and whose example he follows, although as an ex-university lecturer he doesn't have anything like the same kudos of course. But this all makes for a hell of a tale, even if (especially because?) most of this is knitted together as the narrator thinks about what his novel should be like.

Links to my other Viel posts:
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Tanguy Viel: Paris-Brest
Tanguy Viel: L'Absolue perfection du crime
Tanguy Viel: Insoupçonnable