If all this sounds like the voice-over for a steamy documentary long on lap dancers and short on hard-core statistics, please note: these views are held by a woman who earned a master’s degree in literature with a thesis on Daniel Paul Schreber, the German jurist whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, published at the turn of the past century, was hailed by Freud and Lacan as a pioneering work of sexual psychology. At thirty-three, her novels, published in France by Éditions du Seuil, have won important literary awards, generated considerable buzz in academe, and enjoy sales in the hundreds of thousands. Her views on the state of sex in Quebec are, however, based on primary sources. As a student at the Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam) in the late 1990s, Nelly Arcan worked for a high-priced escort agency, an experience she drew on for her debut novel, Putain, published in New York by Grove Press in 2004 as Whore.
“It’s perfectly normal for a writer my age to write about sex,” Arcan says, responding to criticism that her work is limited by fixation on a single subject. “We live in a world obsessed by sex. There are no taboos acting as restraints. Women are conditioned by the profusion of images in advertising created to arouse desire. Obviously, sex is a source of power.”
Both a juicy page-turner and an unsettling report from a social frontier, À ciel ouvert marks Arcan as the front-runner in a generation of accomplished young female writers for whom sex is primary material, a currency, a language, a playing field on which the rules are changing fast. Marie-Sissi Labrèche, Heather O’Neill, Marie Hélène Poitras, Irina Egli — like Arcan, they’re beautiful, well educated, and keenly aware of how valuable this combination of assets is in the international marketplace of literature.
A petite, soft-spoken blonde with unnaturally puffy lips and Owl of Minerva grey eyes, Arcan cultivates a complex public persona. Riding the promotional circuit for À ciel ouvert, she complained that the media couldn’t get beyond her Putain past, that sex is only matière and what counts on the page are words and ideas. Yet her weekly column in the giveaway tabloid Ici deals almost exclusively in anecdotes about dildos, condoms, body parts, and trysts — raunchy slices of thirty-something life. Invited to appear on a popular TV talk show, she wore a gown offering a generous view of her famous surgically enhanced breasts, and was mortified when the male hosts refused to take her seriously.
Dressed in a thick grey sweater, hair tucked up under a cap, Arcan doesn’t stand out in the crowd at Café aux Deux Marie. I stand at the bar for a good ten minutes, keeping an eye on the door. When we finally connect, she flashes a faintly nervous smile, as if relieved to be rescued from the isolation of sitting alone. When I tell her I think she’s an awesomely good writer, she’s surprised. Slow to relax into the subject, she seems strangely removed from her writer self, as if the ability to dissect a character’s psyche in fiercely confident prose were no greater feat than tossing off a newspaper column. She wears her beauty uncomfortably, like someone who has overdressed for the occasion and can’t stop worrying about it. I catch myself wondering what the signals would be like if I were a man.
After an excruciating affair with a French journalist (see Folle), she has been with the same guy for more than two years, a German eight years her junior who lives in Frankfurt and works in public relations. They spend a few weeks together whenever possible. At her insistence, he hasn’t read any of her novels, nor have her parents. “I exposed some very deep wounds in my writing,” she sighs. “I don’t want people close to me to know all that.” Realistically, Nelly, could the man you’re with resist reading Putain? She giggles. “I’m pretty sure he hasn’t. He doesn’t read any books, so why should he read mine?”
Tcharacters in À ciel ouvert and in Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals inhabit more or less the same patch of Boulevard Saint-Laurent and its cross streets as Arcan takes up, though the time frame of O’Neill’s first novel is twenty years earlier, before gentrification hit, before you could get a Botox treatment, Portuguese grilled chicken, a $15,000 sofa, and a hit of ecstasy within a hop and a skip. The world of twelve-year-old Baby and her too-young father, Jules, an addict she both loves and laments, is a white-hot, dangerous place for one so innocent and alone.
During a crazy, transformative eighteen months, the motherless waif turns thirteen and discovers her body, along with the money and dubious sense of validation it can pull in. Like Arcan’s debut, this novel announced an unmistakably original voice. With a narrative pitch as seductive as the well-paced story it tells, Lullabies for Little Criminals is funny and clever, full of marvellous observations from a child savant who wanders into the shadows, arousing the reader’s fear and dread at every turn.