Fatale is the French noir novel you need to help you vent your frustrations right now.
In the weeks since the election, I’ve felt increasingly frustrated by calls for politeness and decorum. There seems to be no end to the “why can’t we all just get along”s, the calls to be more tolerant and understanding, and the pablum about finding unity in our love of books, or whatever. It all feels not just tone-deaf, but also dismissive of the real pain and anger that a lot of us feel.
Churning with those frustrations, I reread Jean Patrick Manchette’s 1977 crime novel Fatale. A prolific writer, translator, screenwriter, and columnist, Manchette’s work is both escapist and uncompromisingly left-wing and revolutionary. Fatale, translated for NYRB by Donald Nicholson-Smith, is full of black humor, violent revenge, and radical politics—a mirror and critique of my own feelings that we don’t all just have to get along.
Fatale follows Aimée Joubert, an assassin-for-hire who leaves an abusive marriage and plans to escape her job by squeezing enough money out of the sleepy and corrupt town of Bléville. Cathartically, she also wants to single-handedly clear the town of assholes.
Manchette’s clear disdain for 1960s French society, especially the moneyed and powerful, drips off of this book. What drew me back to Fatale was the gut-level thrill of watching Aimée punish and plunder small-town conservatives and hypocrites, the swaggering, puffed up, and bratty rich: a doctor, a real estate agent, the owner of a small factory that makes canned food for adults, babies, and cows.
Machette’s books are full of comprised characters. He presents a world that isn’t slick or quippy, but shockingly mediocre and corrupt. His anti-capitalist and anti-elite books offer few heroes, just people caught in a churn of capitalism. Guerillas, activists, billionaires, and protestors ricochet violently into each other in ways that are explosive, thought-provoking, and maddening.
This social stew is part of Manchette’s radical project with his noir, and there’s also a meta-story to Fatale that I find inspiring—Manchette’s politics guided his work. He was a socialist who began to fall in with Trotskyites, especially during the 1960s Algerian War, when anti-colonial forces fought against an oppressive French colonial program abroad.
His violent and chaotic books wed his politics with a Situationist, proto-punk desire to unseat the establishment and experiment. Didier Daeninckx said that “Manchette seized a scorned genre that in the 1960s was right-wing, even extreme right-wing, and in one stroke shattered the conventions.” To quote Book Forum’s Fatale review, Machette seems to say that “to destroy society you must also destroy the crime novel.”
Fatale takes this impulse to the extreme, and is maybe his least stereotypical noir—the French imprint Série noire apparently rejected it for being too literary. There’s still a lot of noir though: the book opens with Aimee murdering a leering hunter, then getting drunk and rubbing herself all over with money.
Aimée’s spree is blearily fun, but this is not a recommendation to emulate Fatale’s main character. Manchette’s books are not intended as how-tos—he told some high schoolers in the ‘90s that “a novel can never be a pamphlet.” Aimée is cathartic to read, but not aspirational: she’s violent and manipulative, a blood-soaked reaping angel. But neither is she fully outside of us and our desires, and the book has a few moments where she gazes into a mirror and speaks to herself—she is the cure and the poison, the French pharmakon.
Aimée wants to humble and sweep away the assholes who are ruining Bléville, all while freeing herself and making a mint—it’s a tempting model for 2024 America. Many have seen Fatale in conversation with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, both books about cleaning up corruption by any means necessary (Manchette’s Bléville is winkingly covered in signs shouting “KEEP YOUR TOWN CLEAN!”) But Manchette’s version is more frustrating, more self-reflective, and with less of a Hollywood ending. Aimee’s mad-cap, unsuccessful crusade points to a political critique not just of the society that the noir is set in, but also of the individualistic solutions the genre proposes. To borrow a kicker from Manchette on Hammett,
The American roman noir…delivered a negative judgment on literature and the entire society of its times. The affair of the present time is no longer this judgment, but rather its execution. Whoever now reads Dashiell Hammett with the simple pleasure of distraction should rather be frightened. For, to put it simply: this is why you will all die.
Manchette described noir as being “characterized by the absence or weakness of the class struggle and its replacement by individual action (which is, incidentally, hopeless).” Aimée is warned by a character in Fatale who serves as the voice of the left that she can’t accomplish her goals alone. She ignores it, to her peril. Fatale’s abrupt and lingering ending underlines the critique: we can’t go it alone. Collective action and solidarity are the real hopes for broader change, no matter how much of a visceral thrill we might get at watching one woman’s vengeance unfurl.
