Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who set off on an orgiastically murderous road-trip round France. In 2000, she became notorious when she collaborated on the hardcore film of the book, which ran into certification problems, with Alexander Walker fulminating about the complete collapse of public decency.
Despentes has now published some 15 novels altogether, celebrated in France as grunge or ‘trash’ fiction — and a polemical, erratically feminist, memoir, King Kong Theory, describing her own experience of rape and prostitution, and calling for a new aggression in female sexuality.
When she was 35, Despentes (a pseudonym, referring to a quarter in Lyon where she was a sex worker) came out as a lesbian, saying it was nice not to be bothered about male approval any more and a relief not to be preoccupied with ageing — so much harder for heterosexuals, she claimed. ‘Seduction exists between girls, but it’s cool; one isn’t dumped at 40.’
Despentes is now 48 and a member of the Academie Goncourt. Vernon Subutex 1, which sold 300,000 copies in France, is the first novel to be translated from a trilogy which she completed this May with Vernon Subutex 3, taking in the attacks of 2015 and 2016 and the ‘Nuit Debout’. She is attempting here a large panorama, or fresco, of contemporary French society — or at least of those members of it who were primarily formed by youth culture and now find themselves left behind by it.
Her hero, sexy Vernon, had a fine old time between the ages of 20 and 45, running a vinyl record shop, a job which provided a plentiful supply of interchangeable girls and cool friends in the music world.
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