New York Times Sunday Book Review (November 17, 2002)
By Marilyn Stasio
There's not a superfluous word or overdone effect in The Prone Gunman(City
Lights Noir, paper, $11.95), one of the last cool, compact and shockingly
original crime novels that Jean-Patrick Manchette left as his legacy to
modern noir fiction when he died in 1995. Its austerity of form heightened
by James Brook's lean translation from the French, this stark account of a
man's professional decline and mental deterioration is all the more chilling
for being the story of a hired killer. Martin Terrier goes about his deadly
business with calm detachment as he prepares to claim the woman he loves and
retire from the trade. His employers would have it otherwise, however, and
before he knows it, Terrier is forced back into his old life (''I have to
work again. . . . I have to work! . . . I must do my job!''). His attempts
to extricate himself begin sensibly enough, but become increasingly
desperate as Manchette turns the screws with consummate control over his
style -- and without a hint of mercy for his victim.
*
The Viallage Voice
The French Connection
by Ben Ehrenreich
November 13-19, 2002
The Prone Gunman
By Jean-Patrick Manchette
City Lights, 155 pp., $11.95
Thirty pages before the finale of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman,
it's hard not to wonder how the book could possibly end. At that point the
novel's protagonist, hit man Martin Terrier, having left a long trail of
corpses in his path, has lost his few friends, every last centime of his
ill-earned savings, and what little dreams sustained him. He has even lost
his voice. But the book does end, in circumstances far worse than you might
easily imagine, on a note of extraordinary bleakness.
Little about Manchette's work could be called ordinary. Between 1971 and
1982, Manchette wrote 10 crime novels, twisting standard noir plotlines into
tightly woven, cutting political critiques, and in the process giving new
life to a genre that had been stagnating in France since the '50s. Dubbed
the father of the neo-polar, the new French crime novel, Manchette abandoned
the genre in the 1980s, in the last decade of his life, writing for
television and film and translating American thrillers by the likes of Ross
Thomas and Donald Westlake. He fell to cancer in 1995, but has himself seen
something of a rebirth in the years since. In France, Gallimard reissued
several of his novels throughout the late '90s. An unfinished novel set in
Castro's Cuba was published there in 1999, and a biography in 2000. Two of
Manchette's novels are now available in English: City Lights releases the
aforementioned The Prone Gunman (1981) this month, and published 1976's
Three to Kill earlier this year.
Jean-François Gérault, Manchette's biographer, calls him "the French
Chandler," but old red Hammett is probably a better match. Manchette was
active in Communist circles throughout the '60s, and turned toward
Situationism in 1967 after reading The Society of the Spectacle. Echoes of
Debord survive in his fiction ("It was all shit," he writes in Three to
Kill. "He would so much rather have been in a place where he could see
things around him that were not in his own image, where everything did not
speak to him of himself"), as does a wryly vulgar Marxism, but the general
outlook of his books is crushingly devoid of revolutionary hopes.
Manchette's characters lurch about in the bitter desolation felt by the
generation of '68 in the years after their revolt crumbled, in a world where
the ritualized battles between equally complacent classes only help disguise
a shared alienation.
Thus Georges Gerfaut, Three to Kill's hapless protagonist, is a former
radical now working for a subsidiary of a giant multinational, living a
cushy bourgeois family life, with nothing of his militant past remaining but
a vague "clutch of left-wing ideas." Georges happens across a murder ordered
by a retired Dominican torturer, does his best to ignore it, but is torn
nonetheless from his emptily perfect life by the efforts of a pair of
vicious but bumbling hit men. It's an old storyline, but Manchette tweaks it
playfully, and to no predictable end. Neither Georges's class consciousness
nor an appreciation for the yuppie good life are awakened by the experience,
only insubstantial longings and a capability for brutality he didn't know he
had.
- - - -
As tongue-in-cheek as much of Three to Kill may be, Manchette took crime
writing seriously. He wrote critically and extensively about what he archly
called "this little sub-literary form," locating its roots in "the worldwide
triumph of counter-revolution between 1920 and 1950," a triumph, he wrote,
that the "dominant ideology" would prefer to ignore. The tensions left in
the wake of this victory, however-all the class fissures that accompany
capitalism along its supposedly inevitable march-gave birth to the crime
novel, which Manchette would ordain "the great moral literature of our era."
By "moral," Manchette means something quite different from the subtle
didacticism of the conventional novel, which continues to show its religious
roots under the guise of character development, insisting, in the end, on
some variety of spiritual transformation for its protagonist. Manchette's
characters, by contrast, are never in control of their destinies, and cannot
even see the forces shaping them. Three to Kill's Gerfaut remains baffled to
the very end, and even the title of The Prone Gunman suggests its hero's
basic helplessness.
Manchette fights off all temptations toward sentimental humanism by refusing
to provide even a glimpse at his characters' inner workings. This happens in
an embryonic way in Three to Kill ("He was thinking that the blood would
soil the leather upholstery; or perhaps he was thinking nothing"), but is
full-blown in The Prone Gunman. Drawing on Robbe-Grillet as much as James M.
Cain, Manchette describes his characters with the same wealth of external
detail, icily delivered, that he uses for apartment decor or a hi-fi system.
We learn what kind of car they drive, and what gun they carry, but when it
comes to motivation or emotion, the narrator is as clueless as we are: "His
haggard face at first registered great perplexity; then it registered worry,
thoughtfulness, or whatever other movements of consciousness that might
cause his face to look as it did."
The Prone Gunman, the last crime novel Manchette wrote, mixes two well-worn
plotlines to cruelly ironic effect: the hit man who wants out of the game
and the working-class boy made good who comes home to claim his girl. Martin
Terrier grows up poor in a puddle of a provincial town, and has the
misfortune to fall for the daughter of the town's one factory owner, who
forbids him from seeing her and sends him packing through the service
entrance. Young Terrier makes his love promise to wait 10 years for him,
swearing, "I will return, I will kill them, I will drag them through the
shit, I will make them eat shit." He does, but not in quite the way he had
hoped: When the decade is up, Terrier, an accomplished assassin, wants to
break free from his employer-a CIA-like American group referred to only as
"the company"-and whisk away his old lover, now an alcoholic housewife who
finds him absurd. The company, of course, does not want to let Terrier go,
and blood and mayhem follow him home.
If The Prone Gunman is a brutal book, it's not just the violence that makes
it so, though there are bits of brains all over, thoracic cages blown bare
of flesh, intestines that empty noisily as bullets pierce their owners. The
deeper brutality is one of tone and vision, of a conquered world bereft of
choice and hope. Terrier's former boss mocks his dreams of flight: "There's
no place good anymore," he says. "There's nowhere to go." If in the mid '70s
Manchette could still write bitter satire, by the early '80s despair had set
in, and, having mastered the genre, he bowed out. There was no place left to
go.
