As an erstwhile reader and critic of Michel Houellebecq, I do not follow the French literary scene as closely as I ought, and so when one of my favorite bookshops displayed Laurent Mauvignier’s "The Birthday Party" as a "Staff Recommendation," I thought it would be a good idea to resume my travails, this time in rural France, with this tale of secrets and lies.

"The Birthday Party" is set in a small town which, as we learn much later in the story, is three stops away from a regional train from Paris. When I first started reading it, an online friend warned me that "it does go on a bit." The novel shows its colors from the first page, with sentences that go on forever, but which, quite miraculously, don’t throw you off track. So from the start, this reader was awed primarily by the translator, Daniel Levin Becker, who manages to render Mauvignier’s language into English and make it readable, despite two-page long sentences.

Another pointer about the novel, from the blurbs, was that it was a cross between Michel Proust and Stephen King, and as I read the Proustian beginning, the musings of Christine, a Parisian painter who lives out her days in rural France, I kept wondering when the King bit would kick in. The sinister side of the story reveals itself after many insinuations and opaque suggestions in the form of threatening letters that Marion has been receiving, as old women with artistic inclinations and dogs do in rural spaces.

This setting reminded me instantly of Olga Tokarczuk’s "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead," and I dearly wished it would be Marion who would inflict the violence when the time came. Slowly but surely Mauvignier does let Christine display violence discursive though it may be, most remarkably, toward her female neighbor Marion.

The novel is told through the stream of consciousnesses of several characters, and after Christine, we move to Patrice, a salt of the earth farmer who is upset with his wife Marion for neglecting her wifely duties, and who, as it follows, is going into town to see a prostitute. This of course is relayed to us as a guilt trip, he really is going into town to buy his wife a birthday present and we read for pages how he regrets he has to stoop to this financial transaction while he has a wife at home. Patrice, then, is a white French male character out of Houellebecq, betrayed by white French women (the prostitute is described as an African refugee), and when you consider the revelations that come later, the whole novel is about why the hell Marion will not sleep with the lovely, if hillbilly, Patrice.

The two have a daughter whose stream of consciousness lets us get a "fair" assessment of Christine’s paintings, of the tension between her parents, and indeed of the tension between Christine and Marion. We get pages and pages of how Christine thinks Marion is unworthy of the lovely Patrice, whom she’s known since he was much younger. Christine has nothing concrete on Marion, but she just knows that Marion is lying to Patrice, and so keeps her distance. When she thinks about the late evenings that Marion spends with her girlfriends when she ought to be entertaining Patrice, and when she imagines how she’ll have to grin and bear their company that evening for Marion’s birthday, this is what Mauvignier has the older woman think of the younger ones:

"Maybe she’ll make the effort to stay so she can say hello to them, even if in truth she hates the sound of giggling – more misogynistic than a man, more critical of women than anyone, looking down on most of them, judging them worthy of the scorn with which most men treat them."

It is true that not all women like women’s company, but some editors should have pointed out to Monsieur Mauvignier that no woman thinks they can be harsher to women than men, because they themselves have been at the receiving end of male misogyny, and are aware of the depths it can reach. Every woman knows that this is no contest.

Having riled this reader up, Mauvignier continues his narration, shifting from Christine to Marion to Patrice, every one of them letting us know in five-page sentences how they are the most misunderstood person on earth, with Marion providing a caricature of a "feminist uprising" in her workplace. Through it all, the wonder is Mauvignier makes you listen; one must admit, he has a way with words.

To this uneasy rural idyll arrive two men and take them, including the girl, hostage, and my mind immediately wanders off to Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games." Whereas in "Funny Games" the intruders have chosen the family they are terrorizing randomly, these two have made their choices wisely. In fact, they are figures from Marion’s past, and how right was Christine to suspect her all along? And indeed, when we go into Christine’s head after the two men have displayed violence, it is primarily Marion that she blames. Marion has invited violence into this homestead now, just like she invited violence onto herself as a young woman when she used to know these men. All this Mauvignier presents as the thoughts of this older woman.

As if this wasn’t enough, we then move on to Marion who takes all the blame and I am thinking of who I can phone to complain about this book as I read the following lines:

"Christine, everything that’s happening has nothing to do with you, this is all me, me, and only me, you’ve been suspicious since the day I showed up here and tonight you’ll know you were right when you took Patrice for a sap I was going to fleece, who I was taking advantage of like a whore."

Here we are then. It is 2023, and the thing that is driving the plot of this celebrated French novel is how a woman has inveigled her way into the deep French countryside and brought violence. In this, the white woman with a history of violence seems to stand in for the immigrant or the Muslim in the imagination this sort of fiction caters to. And so the Houellebecq turn, with its conflated misogyny and Islamophobia, still seems to reign supreme in male French fiction.