The Review of Contemporary Fiction

S by Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, Olivier Rolin, Mark Polizzotti, Florence Delay, Sonja Greenlee and Harry Mathews
Thomas Lecky

Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, Olivier Rolin, Mark Polizzotti, Florence Delay, Sonja Greenlee and Harry Mathews. S. Brookline, 1997. 97 pp. Paper: $12.95.

A truly collaborative effort, S. finds seven French and American writers writing about a group of central characters, themselves centralized by S. herself. S. (or Suzanne) is sent through this collage of variations to meet with her sexuality, crimes and linguistic adventures.
It is fair to call the book Oulipian, given that the book’s final section, “The Quevedo Cipher,” is written by the one American member of the predominantly French group. Like Mathews’s novel Cigarettes, S.’s structure is built on the recurrence of details that shift and metamorphose from section to section. Names and places, objects and actions all refract within the framework. What occurs as we look through this latticework of overlaid detail is at turns tragic, comic, and consistently mysterious.
The convention of mystery writers to begin in medias res is retained by most of the writers of S., it seems, as a means to intensify the title character’s enigmatic life. The writers are also drawn to investigate the mysteries of sexuality, crime, and psychology through the lens of their language. The language of each writer remains playful throughout, as though the greatest mystery is that of the words, as if their manipulation, their movement and plotting, is that same movement and plotting of a sentient being.
After all, it is the words doing all the work. Suzanne is merely a participant, with the readers, in the writers’ activity. The collaboration is inventive and the collage coheres because the different views of Suzanne and her world, seen at various times, are surrounded by the solidly unstable chaos of language. [Thomas Lecky]