The Daring Compassion of ‘Expensive Dickhead’

“In literature written by ladies, examples of insolence or hostility towards males are extraordinarily uncommon,” wrote the French novelist Virginie Despentes in a 2021 essay for Literary Hub. “Whilst a member of that intercourse, I’m not allowed to be offended about this. Colette, Duras, Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Sagan, a complete canon of feminine authors anxious to show their credentials, to reassure the lads, to apologize for writing by endlessly repeating how a lot they love, respect, and cherish males, and the way they don’t have any need—no matter they may write—to fuck them over.“

In 1993, Despentes, then 23, got down to redress that silence along with her best-selling debut novel, Baise-Moi, or “Fuck Me,” during which the creator, the sufferer of a brutal gang rape as a teen, borrowed components of her backstory for her heroes, Manu and Nadine, a rape sufferer and a intercourse employee, who embark on a scorched-earth joyride, robbing ATMs and killing johns apres l’amour within the identify of non-public freeedom. Baise-Moi was a shock to the system, a feminist novel about ladies who watch porn and ingest exhausting medication and booze at a prodigious clip. Consider Thelma & Louise crossed with Pure Born Killers (Despentes tailored Baise-Moi into a movie in 2000). Spare her the niceties of tasteful literary fiction; Despentes is a social observer as indecorous as she is eager, and she or he writes with out mercy.

Vernon Subutex, a later Despentes challenge, expanded her scope with out watering down her pitiless mission. It was a big ensemble piece, a sweeping trilogy that dissected 2010s Paris, which was riven by financial uncertainty and the far proper’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. The title character, a former record-store proprietor, is now a discarded anachronism who hops frantically from sofa to sofa and finally winds up on the road. Despentes gives no quarter to her titular hero, whose darkish wit and casually racist rants come on the reader in a mad rush of metaphors and aphorisms, Despentes’s gutter vernacular of the underclass.

After studying that Despentes’s new novel would cowl social media, #MeToo, and COVID, I used to be prepared for a full-throttle garroting of the digital world and its position in fueling misogyny and senseless hate. As an alternative, Expensive Dickhead, which was first printed in France in 2022, is a extra nuanced and redemptive novel than followers would possibly anticipate from this poète maudit of the marginalized. Nestled inside her evisceration of the on-line manosphere is a plea for connection in a world turned the wrong way up. At a time when reflexive rage is the go-to mode throughout the ideological spectrum, Despentes has grabbed the mic to supply a form of counterprotest to the social-media backlash. Expensive Dickhead harks again to the unique promise of the web as a binding agent fairly than a mental-health scourge, suggesting {that a} truce within the gender wars could be secured by sliding into each other’s DMs with a dose of empathy.

Most of Expensive Dickhead transpires throughout the international lockdown in 2020, when on a regular basis life was effaced and other people had been instantly obsessive about bathroom paper and singing “Glad Birthday” whereas washing their arms. Among the many many who’ve gone on-line for photographs of dopamine is Oscar Jayack, a literary novelist and Despentes’s titular “dickhead.” The ebook, which consists fully of web communications, begins when Oscar tears into Rebecca Latté, a film star, in a social-media put up laced with the key phrases of the entitled sexist: “This chic girl … now a wrinkled toad. Not simply outdated. However fats, scruffy, with repulsive pores and skin …” Rebecca instantly rises to the bait: “You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap previous … Waah, waah, waah, I’m a pissy little pantywaist … so I whimper like a Chihuahua within the hope somebody will discover me.”

That is often the purpose at which the creator presses exhausting on the gasoline, however what begins as a flame-fest shades by increments right into a confessional. After Oscar has been dressed down by Rebecca, we be taught that his nasty put up was a bid to get her consideration and gauge her curiosity in a movie challenge. Because it seems, Oscar shouldn’t be a rank stranger; his sister Corinne is an outdated pal of Rebecca’s, which stokes Rebecca’s ire: “Screw your apologies, screw your monologue … I don’t give a fuck about your collected literary works … I don’t give a shit about you. All my like to your sister, she was a beautiful pal.”

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Because the messages volley forwards and backwards, a tenuous bond is solid. Oscar tells Rebecca that he was envious of his sister’s braveness in popping out and residing proudly as a lesbian, and this jostles one thing free in Rebecca. She gives up her personal story: She leveraged her magnificence into movie stardom, solely to now discover herself a used-up commodity in early center age, her intercourse enchantment dropping amplitude alongside along with her profession. She is the novel’s Vernon Subutex, a sufferer of Hollywood’s youth cult and the decline of larger-than-life film stars within the age of bite-size, user-generated content material. She is huge; it’s the photographs that received small.

After Oscar reveals that he has “been MeToo’ed,” Despentes hard-cuts to a weblog written by Zoé Katana, a ebook publicist who has accused Oscar of sexual harassment, and who vents with nice rhetorical aptitude: “We are able to establish with the bull within the bullring,” she writes. “We have now been reared and nurtured for the only real objective of being put to demise in an enviornment the place we stand no probability.” She turns into a preferred feminist tradition warrior, whereas Oscar turns into catatonic—he drinks to extra and endlessly fiddles on his telephone. Rebecca scoffs—ugly on-line insults from strangers are nothing new to her—however she tells him that she can be self-medicating with medication hand-delivered by her seller.

Oscar and Rebecca discover frequent floor—tentatively at first, then with nice curiosity—over their addictions, their shared need to negate themselves. Oscar attends Narcotics Nameless conferences on Zoom. Rebecca surreptitiously logs on, then attends a gathering in individual. “The wonderful factor about this alliance of misfits and maladjusted freaks,” she writes to Oscar, “is that no person provides you a tough time.” Rebecca has discovered the one social discussion board that doesn’t chew again, that subordinates judgment to context and compassion.

When Rebecca complicates their rapprochement by befriending Zoé, Oscar fulminates and doubles down on his sense of victimhood. At this level, we’re prepared for Rebecca to relegate Oscar to the same old destiny of a male Despentes villain. As an alternative, Rebecca sympathizes. Feeling invested in Oscar, she is intent on altering his thoughts. At her suggestion, he reads Zoé’s weblog, and he begins to reexamine his assumptions; he berates himself for by no means publicly acknowledging the feminine writers who’ve influenced him “as a result of I do know that, once you’re a man, different guys are suspicious of your relationships with ladies.”

Has Despentes gone delicate and gooey on us? Not fairly. Expensive Dickhead ends with a vicious social-media pile-on, the gorgon of Instagram rearing its head. Nonetheless, that is probably the most optimistic novel of Despentes’s profession. It additionally will be the most subversive—a fictional riposte to doomsday greatest sellers, equivalent to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Technology, that blame the web for nearly the whole lot ostensibly improper on the planet. If social media has triggered a world mental-health epidemic, that comes all the way down to selections made by tech companies and by us, the customers, cloaked in our alternate identities, our base want for consideration and respect pushed to the foreground. By providing one another their true self, Oscar and Rebecca use digital discourse to spark a real friendship primarily based on transparency and honesty. France’s most unforgiving dispenser of fictional vengeance upon male oppressors has maintained her cultural edge by meting out grace as an alternative.