A Georges Simenon romans durs frequently features a protagonist forced to deal with a tragedy or crisis occurring in the opening chapter. I can see why many critics liken Pascal Garnier to Georges Simenon, most especially after reading The Front Seat Passenger.
Similar to a Simenon Chapter One, Pascal Garnier has his protagonist, Fabien Delorme, return from a weekend spent with his father only to enter his empty apartment and play back an urgent telephone message from a hospital telling him his wife has been in a serious road accident. Fabien knows for certain his wife, Sylvie, is dead.
As if a researcher at a microscope in a biology lab, literary artist Pascal Garnier turns up the magnification on his main character to examine the ways in which widower Fabien will deal with life without Sylvie.
The Front Seat Passenger is one probing existential tale. And being Pascal Garnier, also crime noir, although the violence, lots and lots of violence, doesn't kick in until the final third.
The novel is too well constructed and too captivating for me to divulge any of the tantalizing details, thus I'll shift to the book's first chapters highlighting Fabien's psychic dilemmas and gyrations leading up to the unfolding drama and eventual hog-wild hyper-violence.
Smothered Sensibilities - "From the moment she had left them when Fabien was five, she was always referred to as Charlotte, never 'Maman'. Fabien had never heard his father say a bad word about her, nor a good word; he simply didn't mention her." Exchanges with his father leave little doubt Fabien's motherless childhood and adolescence left the young man emotionally starved. Fabien's father can barely communicate with his son beyond a few grunts and stock phrases. Like a virus, this difficulty to communicate infects Fabien and leaves its indelible mark.
Splashing Cold Water on the Fire of Love - "So they had let time elapse between them, slow but inexorable, like the advancing desert. They didn't do anything or say anything about it. They didn't have children or get a dog or a cat. They did nothing and their relationship withered." At first, Fabien and Sylvie were deeply in love, only interested in each other, their happiness overflowing. But one day Sylvie decided their love was abnormal and couldn't last. Perhaps a consequence of Sylvie's abortion, their love and passion quickly turned into cold, stale indifference.
Signature Black Humor - "The inspector walked the way he talked, in hurried little bursts, throwing anxious glances over his shoulder, as if he feared Fabien would try to escape. The brown paper case from a cream cake was stuck to his left heel. It reminded Fabien of one of those paper fishes from April Fool's Day." Fabien follows a police inspector down a hallway leading to the morgue where he will be asked to identify Sylvie's corpse. Even during this tragic scene, Pascal Garnier can't help himself: he has Fabien tell the inspector he has a cream cake wrapper stuck to his shoe.
Vital Detail - "The inspector rushed off to the toilets, leaving his brand-new notebook and chewed pen behind on the low table." During the police interview, the inspector interrogates Fabien about Sylvie's weekend trip to Dijon. Fabien had absolutely no idea Sylvie has been carrying on an affair with a married man. The inspector can clearly see Fabien is telling the truth. And when the inspector informs the twenty-something young man both his wife and her lover died in a car crash, Fabien asks, in turn, the identity of the married man. Sorry, the inspector replies, he can not divulge that information.
But at that moment Fabien spills his coffee across the table and in the inspector's lap. The inspector excuses himself and heads to the rest room. This leave Fabien time to open the inspector's notebook and record the address of the married man - a critical turning point in the story.
Existential Alienation - "But sooner or later, everyone would have to know. He would have preferred it to be later. The real penance was about to begin. He was going to have to tell the story ten times over, hundreds of times over, thank people, shake people's moist hands, kiss their flaccid, damp cheeks, see distant provincial cousins." Echoes of Monsieur Meursault from Albert Camus' The Stranger. Obliged to deal with death, Fabien has the feeling he's reduced to a fixed, social role having little to do with the dynamics and ongoing struggles of his own inner person.
Friendship and Childhood - "Gilles and Fabien were living in Léo's playground. Their chief occupation consisted of leaning on the windowsill watching the world go by." As a way of helping Fabien recover, friend Gilles insists the new widower stay at his apartment with him and his son (Gilles is separated from his wife). During his stint with Gilles, Fabien gets in touch with his own forgotten ability to do nothing and also, via his interaction with little Léo, his own lost childhood.
New Man; New Life - "As long as he stayed within the perimeter of Rue Charlot, he could pass for a resident of the neighborhood, but when he followed them further afield, he took care to keep his distance." Since he knows her address, Fabien ventures out on new discoveries revolving around Madeleine, the young, blonde, pale-skinned widow of Sylvie's dead lover. New life, indeed.
Pascal Garnier peered deep into the human heart, detecting how emotional damage and grief can bubble up in later years with tragic, even violent, consequences - case in point: The Front Seat Passenger.
Left on his own following Sylvie's death, Fabien has a profound shift of identity. "Fabien felt as if he didn't exist any more, as if Sylvie's disappearance had caused him to disappear as well. Perhaps death was contagious. Or he was morphing into Peter Brady, from H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man, Sylvie's favorite hero."
French novelist Pascal Garnier, 1949-2010
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