François Nourissier: La Fête des pères (1985)

This is the first novel by François Nourissier that I've read, and I doubt that it'll be my last. Nourissier writes in a very austere style that evidently doesn't appeal to many people, although I have no problems with that.

The narrator here is just called N., a very successful fifty-seven-year-old writer who's been separated from his wife Sabine for a few years and has a nineteen-year-old son, Lucas. On the face of it the novel seems to be about N.'s (non-)relationship with Lucas, whom he meets regularly for a restaurant meal or whatever, but fails in any way to relate to his son: conversation impossible. But Lucas and this lack of communication with him obsesses N.

But much of the physical – as opposed to psychological – material in the novel is away from Lucas: it is based in the Germanic town B. (which may well represent Bonn), where N. has been invited to give an important talk about his work. N. is nervous in his hotel before the occasion and has a few whiskies from the mini-bar, along with a few amphetamines.

Before the grand speech N. meets Nicole Lapeyrat, whom he knew as Nicole Henner before she met Silvain Lapeyrat. N. helps himself to more drink and (surreptitiously) more speed, and Nicole helps to prevent N.'s speech from being a disaster. Later the dinner is at the Lapeyrat home, and it is during the dinner that N.'s relationship with Nicole seventeen years before comes out, and the suggestion that the sixteen-year-old Bérénice, Nicole's daughter, is N.'s.

Flashback to seventeen years before, when N. had a one-year affair with Nicole, at a time when Sabine was hospitalised following the birth of Lucas, who spent the time in an incubator. And after N. split with Nicole he returned very briefly to her, although left when learning that she had met someone else. And when he returned it's possible Bérénice (surely named after Aragon's novel Aurélie that N. had introduced Nicole to?) was a result of that occasion: the dates tie up. But then, the Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel said paternity is only adoption, as the narrator notes. Is that an excuse?

The drunken N. isn't even escorted to his hotel from the dinner but driven there in a taxi, and yet he expects to see Nicole or Bérénice waiting goodbye to him at the train station when he returns to Paris, but no. This is a novel of solitude, lack of communication, ageing and bad parenting. If Nourissier intended the reader to be sympathetic to N., it's hard to see how.