Tanguy Viel’s American Novel

Abstract

Tanguy Viel’s La disparition de Jim Sullivan (2013) questions the conventions of the “American novel” in a variety of modes. By turn mimetic, ironic, and parodic, that questioning is always significantly mobile, and it demands that we readers be equally mobile as we make our way through the text. What gradually becomes apparent here is not so much a real American novel executed by a real French writer as the fiction of an American novel executed by a fictional French writer.