Alexandre Jardin: Bille en tête (1986)

This is Alexandre Jardin's first novel, written when he was just twenty years old. And it starts brilliantly with a potentially glorious group of characters. The 'hero' is sixteen-year-old Virgile, whose mother he related to but died when he was eight, leaving him with his father, the awful domineering Raoul, and his brother Philippe, who takes after his father rather than his mother. Only his grandmother Arquebuse really loves him, and helps him to get out of scrapes.

Virgile's father has sent him well away from Paris, where he risks getting into difficulties, such as learning about life, so he's sent to boring Evreux, where with luck he can do no wrong. But Virgile seeks sex, fame and money, which he knows he can't find in Evreux, so he escapes with his friend Claude: they board a train to Paris, first class, with no money, and when an employee collars Virgile, asking him for his ticket and his business, Virgile says the prime minister wants to see him. Obviously Virgile and Claude are due to spend a night in the cells, although Arquebuse settles the cops' nonsense and frees them.

Virgile is expelled from the boarding school in Evreux, partly for the foiled escape, partly because he tells the head of the school that he left because he stood no chance of being Molière of Mozart if he remained in the school. And so his father dumps him in another boarding school in Evreux, from which he of course absconds, although the book just starts to fall apart here.

I don't mind not believing things (aren't all books, fiction or 'non-fiction', all lies anyway?), I don't mind literary fantasy, literary dreams (even wet), but our excessively clumsy virgin Virgile meets the sophisticated, rich, (badly) married thirty-five-year-old Clara and sparks fly with the semen, this is lust at first sight, she meets him outside the school gates in her chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce (and the chauffeur will become Claude's gay lover), and, er, who cares: Alexandre Jardin has just destroyed his first novel, which started so well.