Gérard Gavarry's Hops

Abstract

Once in a great while a novel comes along that pleases and astonishes not only by virtue of the story it tells, but also by virtue of its form, and the new possibilities that it suggests for the genre itself. Gerard Gavarry's Hop la! un deux trois (2001) is just such a book, one of the richest and most innovative novels to appear in France in recent years. Set in the suburbs of Paris, it puts on stage figures seen only rarely in French fiction: supermarket employees, long-distance truck drivers, fatigued commuters, and young, supremely disaffected banlieusards. Clearly, one of the things that Gavarry is after in his project is to persuade his readers that the banlieue and its inhabitants deserve more attention than they have been accorded in fiction. And in that sense Hop la! is a deeply committed social text, invoking what Franqois Maspero (speaking from the perspective of an intra-muros Parisian) called monde qu'on a sous les yeux et qu'on ne voit pas: ce monde des frontibres, qui, ai chacun de nous, fait un peu peur (18).1 The tale that Gavarry tells is a fairly simple (if violent) one, focusing upon an adolescent named Ti-Jus Deux-Rivibres who rapes and murders his mother's supervisor, Madame Fenerolo; and the narrative archetype that Gavarry appeals to is the biblical account of Judith's seduction and decapitation of Holofernes. What complicates his tale, however, is the fact that Gavarry tells it three times over, in three separate parts of his novel. Those parts, entitled respectively Le cocotier, Le cargo, and Le Centaure, present Gavarry's story in three different modes, or tones, with three sets of images and three vocabularies of key terms. The first relies on tropical images, as if the banlieue itself had suddenly been transplanted to a more conventionally exotic shore. Gavarry's characters speak to each other using words borrowed from the lexicon of the coconut industry, in a jargon that, in the first instance at least, appears to be impenetrable. The second part transforms the banlieue into a seascape; here, the characters' discourse is awash in arcane nautical terms. The final part invokes the mythology surrounding centaurs, and, like those figures, its lexicon is a hybrid creation, where modern French and ancient Greek vex each other in intriguing ways.