Novels

Quant au riche avenir (1985)

Young Z is a teenage boy who lives with his aunt (known simply as ‘Tante’) in a suburb of Paris, having lost his parents when he was very small. Divided into three sections, under the headings ‘Girlfriend’, ‘Tante’ and ‘School’, the third-person narrative explores, in meticulous detail, young Z's relationships with these three entities. Each is fraught with anxiety and endless reflection. The Girlfriend lives in a faraway province, only visiting Paris occasionally, and most of the relationship is conducted by letter. Young Z is frustrated by the amount of time it takes the Girlfriend to respond to his letters and also, when a letter from her does finally arrive, by the relatively bland nature of its contents. When the two of them do meet from time to time in Paris, young Z finds the anticipation of the rendezvous overwhelming, while the actual time they spend together is flat and passes too quickly. Separation is intolerable since young Z finds he has nothing substantial to cling to. Gradually young Z finds himself getting more and more skilled at shutting off his emotions, which seem to bring him nothing but grief. His relationship with Tante is, on the whole, depressing, and young Z experiences the woman as chilly and impenetrable. He spends much of his time trying to work out what the nature of the love they share for one another consists of. Occasional flashes of communion and mutual solidarity suggest that something real exists. At school, young Z is ostracized for being eccentric, although his extreme intelligence gives him a certain pride. He enjoys a brief friendship with another boy, Blériot, but this does not work out owing to young Z's increasingly perverse, mistrustful and contemptuous disposition. He experiences himself as increasingly false and insincere, and is unable to distinguish real feelings from feigned ones. The sudden death of a popular female classmate leaves him perplexed at the way in which myths of lovability get created in the wake of irretrievable loss. Increasingly depressed by daily existence, young Z runs out of school one day with the intention of effecting some radical separation from his own life, but is prevented from taking whatever action he was going to take by the memory of the good, calm face of Tante.