Book

Je suis Romane Monnier

Delphine de Vigan

5/5

History of disappearance

I have been an admirer of Delphine de Vigan’s fiction for many years. I was first enthralled by Les heures souterraines (Underground time) which captured with satisfying precision the alienation of urban commuting. Her subsequent autofictional novel about her bipolar mother, Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit (Nothing holds back the night) spoke powerfully and authentically about what it is like to be a child of a parent with a mental illness. Her penultimate novel Les enfants sont rois (Kids run the show) delved into another contemporary social phenomenon, that of children influencers and their parents and wove an uncommonly insightful text on the topic.

Initially the narrative of Je suis Romane Monnier centres around the everyday object that is the mobile phone, but soon the subject matter stretches wide, from our need for authenticity and purpose, to our means of understanding and connecting with others and ourselves in the modern world. This may sound too philosophical and vague, but the author explores these issues without pretence, with thoughtful and elegant simplicity and solely through the experiences of her characters.

This novel has not as yet been translated into English, but I’m certain it will be soon, as a good selection of de Vigan’s novels have been in the past, and there is no reason to bypass this excellent work. And I’m guessing the title won’t be translated as I am Romane Monnier, in fact I can see that a number of alterative English titles would be better suited to this wide-reaching account of our being in the world today.

When you glean falseness in others, there is no going back. Suddenly the whole world reveals its hollow inauthenticity that it is hard to bear and overcome. The young woman from the title, Romane Monnier, reaches this point, further worn down by social media and expectations of her colleagues, bosses, friends and family. As de Vigan points out the assumption that you can always pull yourself together when going through a difficult period, that this is just something you can do, and that if you don’t you are deliberately selfish or difficult, continues to be a frequently held opinion. Moreover, Romane struggles to accept the flexibility of truth and memory, because she doesn’t have a strong foothold anywhere else. The elusive changeability of memory, the fact that everyone has their own version of the past grates against the brittleness of her character, resulting in her inability to find valuable meaning anywhere.

In counterpoint to Romane, we have Thomas, a gentle middle-aged man and single parent of melancholic disposition. The void of his daughter’s recent departure from their household has created an opportunity for ancient wounds and struggles to resurface. Sharing neighbouring tables at the restaurant La Malice Thomas and Romane mistakenly take each other’s phone, or so it seems. This sets the narrative into motion and as Romane returns Thomas’ phone but asks him to keep hers, and furthermore gives him her password, in his lonely evenings he is drawn to exploring her phone and piecing together her life and mental state like a detective.

The information in Romane’s phone acts on Thomas in the same way reading a good novel would, opening a door to another world. Nevertheless Thomas’ crude invasion of Romane’s privacy also serves the purpose of reflecting to him an image of a parallel lonely life and shaking him out of his depressive state.

De Vigan excels in bringing together disparate characters, without superficially turning them into friends or lovers, respecting the wide spectrum of relationships that exist between not knowing someone and being very close to them. Very few authors explore this spectrum well, and yet our lives mostly consist of these in-between relationships, neither close, nor far.

The connection between Thomas and Romane mediated by a much maligned mobile phone device becomes more authentic than it first appears. De Vigan shows that despite endangering our privacy, trivialising human connections, stealing our time and perpetuating an unhealthy and addictive focus on trivia, the humble mobile phone can also be an instrument for unexpected insights into self and others.

There is something in de Vigan’s reading of emotional situations and relationships that is uniquely sharply analytical and perspicuous without for a moment losing the core human warmth for her characters. She is a hypersensitive barometer of feelings and moods, inscribing them like a seismographic device, but also explaining them and contextualising them masterfully. In a winning combination, she most often examines very contemporary social phenomena from an equally contemporary and always thoughtful viewpoint, utterly devoid of modish superficiality. Concentrating on the psychology of characters and their emotions, her writing is never sentimental or without literary purpose.

Romane’s discomfort with the world leads her to seek a way to disappear. A true child of our era, she is only able to discuss her situation with ChatGPT. Who has not dreamt of disappearing without a trace? A fresh start promises to be an easy solution to the accumulation of problems, discomfort and depression. But as we fear the worst for Romane, the author reminds us that everyone needs different things to heal, and that disappearing may not be entirely what it seems.