Dear Dickhead, the latest novel by Virginie Despentes (translated from the French by Frank Wynne), is a rare beast—a literary work that successfully uses an old-fashioned form (in this case, the novel of letters, which reached its height of popularity in the eighteenth century) to speak refreshingly to the current moment. Letters between Oscar Jayack and Rebecca Latté, childhood neighbors reacquainted as adults, make up the bulk of this epistolary novel, billed as “an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons.”
Oscar is a flailing mid-list writer who prides himself on being anti-establishment, while Rebecca is a movie star who’s frustrated with her uncertain position in an industry that relegates aging women to the sidelines. After years apart, a chance meeting in Paris prompts Oscar to post on Instagram, casually describing Rebecca’s present-day appearance as that of a “wrinkled toad,” bemoaning that she looks like “a tragic metaphor for an era swiftly going to hell.”
Rebecca begins her response to this vile post with the salutation from which this novel gains its title:
Dear Dickhead,
I read your post on insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. It’s shitty and unpleasant.
And so begins a string of correspondence that evolves into a novel of uncommon depth and poignancy, without ever losing its bite.
While not instantly familiar to mainstream American audiences, Virginie Despentes is a literary celebrity in France, having published more than fifteen full-length works, including the acclaimed Vernon Subutex trilogy and King Kong Theory. Her work is subversive, disruptive, and infused with a punk sensibility that rejects conventionality. The characters she creates refuse to be contained, and she often uses provocation as a device to force readers into reexamining controversial issues. (For instance, the French title of this novel is Cher Connard, considerably more vulgar than the playful English rendition.) Her work also frequently deals with large ideas of gender, class, and sexuality, and Dear Dickhead is no exception.
For readers who don’t enjoy coarse language in their fiction, it’s best to steer clear of Dear Dickhead, for the title is a tiny hint of what’s to come. There’s nothing cozy about the subject matter covered, or the way the characters discuss it. The topics that preoccupy these two middle-aged celebrities range from universal experiences like aging (“ultimately it’s a lot like adolescence, only more disgusting”), addiction, and family relationships, to issues specific to their lives as successful artists—fame, artistic compromises, and relevancy (“I’m an actress. If nobody loves me, I don’t exist.”). Throughout it all, these characters maintain the combination of sharp intellect and blisteringly funny dark humor that Despentes instills in them. The two protagonists start many of their letters with insults of scathing intensity, and it’s when the insults are flying that the writing feels most alive.
Oscar’s commentary about the way Rebecca looks is what kicks off their courtship of insults, but they continue talking out of a mix of loneliness and a shared understanding as recovering addicts. A few emails in, news breaks on the internet that Oscar is at the center of a #MeToo scandal, when Zoé, his former publicist, writes a blog post accusing him of sexual harassment. He comes to Rebecca seeking sympathy, and although she’s softened toward him by this point, in the face of these accusations, she has none to give, telling him, “If talented sociopaths can instinctively sniff out a perfect victim, you’re the runt of the litter as narcissistic perverts go.” But she doesn’t halt their conversation. This new turn of events just takes their discussions in a new direction, and with the help of Rebecca, Oscar begins to see himself as others do.
Zoé serves as both a catalyst for the protagonists’ continued conversation and a foil to their privileged viewpoints, representing a younger generation that espouses a radical feminist ideology neither Rebecca nor Oscar understands. As she simultaneously gets trolled by Oscar’s fans and is befriended by Rebecca, who admires her ability to stand up to the patriarchy, Zoé also illustrates, through excerpts from her blog posts featured every few chapters, the grip the concept of fame has on contemporary culture. Both Rebecca and Oscar acknowledge that fame is a necessary part of their lives. Without it, neither would have careers, but it’s also caused considerable personal problems for them both. Or, as Rebecca succinctly puts it: “Public figures like you and me, we’re streetlights. People hang stuff off you, they piss on you, they lean against you to think or to throw up. They do what they like. All that matters is that your streetlight is on a busy street.”
One of the best things about Despentes’s writing is that she allows her characters to contain multitudes of contradictions concurrently. As much as Dear Dickhead is about being chronically online, seeing the world from a limited vantage point, this is a book with a thoroughly adult sensibility, for readers who have a wider sense of the world than what they can see on their iPhone screens. She doesn’t make it easy to take sides in this battle of the sexes either: both Rebecca and Oscar spout some heinously judgmental opinions. But Despentes doesn’t seem interested in writing that will be agreeable to everyone; she’s written these characters as fully developed people, and when discussing topics that are contentious, people are bound to have viewpoints that could stand to be revised. The relationship between Oscar and Rebecca serves as an illustration of the concept that communication won’t solve everything, but it’s rarely without any merit. And while the bulk of the writing between Oscar and Rebecca is quite conversational, Wynne has done an excellent job translating the lyrical language that flows when the main characters wax philosophical, as Oscar does near the end of the book:
A glittering anthill. Back in Paris at rush hour—night falls in broad daylight. On the ring road, an uninterrupted string of white lights on my left, and in front of me an endless stream of red lights—I’m listening to Prince Rakeem. Each in their own car, gripping the steering wheel. I dream I can hear what’s going on inside each car, radio stations, soccer commentaries, telephone conversations, news reports, opera, golden oldies, anguished silence, Collège de France lectures, work conversations, the audiobook of In Search of Lost Time, arguments about vaccine passports. A mosaic of our differences in this visual homogeny, this rushing torrent of headlights. All of us, at the same time—heading home. What we thought would forever be our lives, snuffed out, without so much as a whimper. We comply. It’s not difficult to tell ourselves we had no choice.
Dear Dickhead is at its best when the protagonists are cleverly trading barbs back and forth, shooting to kill. That’s both the strength and limitation of an epistolary novel. The reader can only go so deep into this relationship when the correspondents choose what comments to respond to and ignore the rest. We don’t get to see the nonverbal reactions to questions that get ignored or the moments the writer edits themself before responding to something impulsively. But what initially seems like a potential weakness may be Dear Dickhead’s biggest triumph. Having selective access to these characters forces readers to engage honestly with them. In a world where digital communication has taken over and curation of online personas seems omnipresent, Despentes compels the reader to take Oscar and Rebecca at their word and accept the limited scope in which they’re willing to present themselves.
Virginie Despentes’s contemporary take on the novel of letters poses an interesting question for readers: what if we took more time to meet people where they are, without demanding they fit into a prescribed version of how they “should” be? Oscar and Rebecca’s relationship is one version of what this can look like. They don’t agree on many major issues, but by the end of the novel, they’ve accepted each other’s flaws, and grown as humans. In her final letter to him, Rebecca writes: “We went through it all together, you and I. Life has a sense of humor. When I think back to our first emails, it seemed unlikely that you’d change my life. And that you’d change yours.” It’s a perfectly imperfect ending to a novel that tackles big ideas with intellect, heart, and a deliciously wicked sense of humor.
Copyright © 2024 by David Vogel. All rights reserved.
