Oddly enough, I just started reading The Long Good Bye, having only seen Altman’s adaptation. The quest is there, but it also seems—to me at least—to be this wonderful snapshot of a specific time period and culture within it. In The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection, Contemporary Paris seems to be almost like another character , Virgil’s only reliable, predictable friend. And cultural references abound. What are your thoughts on all of this?
Paris, for me, is a very important city, because I spent all my youth (until I was twenty-five years old) in the suburbs of Paris. Unlike in the US, French suburbs are poor areas with nothing, nothing to do, and are of course very ugly. I’ve lived in Paris for ten years now. I love Paris like someone who has suffered from hunger loves food, like someone who has suffered from the thirst loves water.
Paris has three roles in this novel: First, Paris is Virgil’s only stable relationship. You can count on the inanimate things. Second, it was important for me to write about Paris. It’s actually the Paris I know, but it’s an invisible Paris in a way, because it’s never described in books. It’s the real city where my friends and I live. Far from clichés, far from the “museum” or “bourgeois” Paris. A real people city, where we live, with cheap (but good) restaurants where we go, nice cafés. A very mixed city, with African and Asian people, a city where it’s a pleasure to live even if it’s not always comfortable. But the gentrification is about to destroy it. So I wrote about that, a kind of destruction of Paris, a silent destruction—by credits cards, young bourgeois couples, and franchise stores. Lastly, a landscape always tells a reader something about the main character’s state of mind. Paris here is also a way to show Virgil’s personality and thoughts.
