Oh… Philippe Djian

Yes, indeed. Another Djian. Why not. I blame Emma.

The book’s “ouverture” is similar to that of Vengences in its confusion of the characters who will populate it and their relation towards each other. I had to draw a mini tree of characters in the beginning to understand who is dating whom and who is the father of whom, and is our protagonist male or female (fortunately the French e muet always helps in separating genders) and to whom, our Michèle, our main character and narrator, was married. Or is she still?

This commotion of characters and the ensuing confusion to the reader is created, as always is the case, over dinner hosted by Michèle. Michèle was married to Richard for twenty years. They have a son Vincent, boyfriend of pregnant Agnès – impregnated by another- who is looking for an apartment in Paris to move in with Agnes and her future child.

The reader’s opinion is quickly formed as to who is the more genial, the more obnoxious, the more abusive, or the more dependent among the bunch, especially as Michèle is singled out as the more mature, the more stable and the more responsible among them.

But let’s back up a tad, to that first sentence of the book:

Je me suis sans doute éraflé la joue (I most definitely scraped my cheek)

This light injury of the cheek has nothing harmless about it; Michèle was raped, a couple of days before the dinner, and the reader only knows about it dozens of pages later. At this stage of the book, one has nothing but compassion towards Michèle: she decides to support her son financially in finding an apartment in Paris, even though she objects to him sticking to Agnès, she silently bares the trauma of the rape, not sharing it with her best friend and longtime business partner, Anna, her mother, at 70, takes up a lover half her age, and pretty soon her father is revealed to have been the murderer of 70 children in a Club Mickey!

As disturbing as the above might seem, there are light touches of humorous writing surrounding Michèle, and this humorous writing is revealed as we start discovering that Michèle and Robert have regular sex. Robert is Anna’s husband; Anna, the godmother of Vincent to boot. Michèle is quite candid in why she started sleeping with Robert: out of boredom, solitude and because he was there. The problem Robert is unaware of is the presence of an even closer Patrick, the neighbor of Michèle, having recently moved with his wife to their neighborhood, and towards whom Michèle is now developing a purely sexual attraction; an attraction that she is actively trying to sparkle within Patrick, whose wife is now on a pilgrimage trip to Lourdes! Add to this foreground an immature son and an insecure ex-husband constantly calling in and requesting support, and I start to laugh, even now.

That said, at times, the reader wonders if our narrator will get any kind of break, and in a succession of phrases Michèle moves from being busy seducing Patrick (maybe because his wife is a Lourdes pilgrim) to dealing with terribly tragic news that floor her. Yet, she gets up on her feet again and alone bears it all and still finds the strength to act again as the focal point to her dysfunctional surrounding.

I leave out several details, several twists and changes in order to get the readers of this review excited about buying this book and reading it. Though the rules of morality seem completely insignificant to her, still I’m drawn to Michèle and I completely sympathized with her, even when she is at her lowest, and she does have these decisions where I wished she wouldn’t take them, but she does.

Michèle, and incidentally the other women in this book are strong. Strong in the conventional sense of able to bear and in the modern sense of liberated, and consciously bearing the consequences of their independence. I admire their refusal of the status quo, sometimes imposed by too much solitude, but at the same time setting down their own boundaries. They lead their men; they make more money than they do, and they provide the security and the stability that these men are lacking. I wonder if it’s too much to say that it is reflective of a changed society; but at the very least, the well-defined microcosm in which the characters of Oh… evolve certainly has the traditional roles reversed.

Michèle’s body itself is a captivating literary creation. It bears injuries in the beginning and throughout the book, is split between three men who crave it, withstands violent sex, blackmail sex, and still provides enough support for the woman herself to be revealed as the source of support and dependency of men around her, after the gratification craze has abandoned them.

A highly recommended book.