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Morale lunch, anyone? The last temptation of Kinsley Lights, camera ... Miami! Under the Covers Buzzing about the buzz machine BROWSE THE
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BY DAVID DOWNIE | As France rejoices over its stunning World Cup victory, observers wonder if the nation will relapse into a virulent form of spring fever known as Mazarine Pingeot. Starting in April, some 80,000 French have succumbed, including eminent members of the literary establishment. The symptoms are drowsiness, irritability and a cottony mouth. They derive from the almost immediate realization that one has spent 129 francs (about $22) on what may be the most media-managed novel in the country's history. Mazarine Pingeot is the author of "Premier roman" ("First Novel"), released in April by Julliard, the celebrated Paris publisher whose founder discovered Françoise Sagan and other bestselling intellectual novelists. Pingeot also happens to be the 23-year-old love child of former socialist French President François Mitterrand, who recognized her publicly in 1994. Not surprisingly, "Premier roman" is Pingeot's first novel. The title nicely evokes the writer's earnest adolescent gropings and clumsily veiled autobiography. It is strictly two-dimensional: a saccharine, juvenile romance about coming of age among the Left Bank's jeunesse dorée, teenagers with profound existential insights and generous allowances. Agathe, Mazarine's gorgeous but humorless fictional double, is a PC coed libertine who shares her love and lust with Victor (a fellow student) and Hadrien (a rebellious but sensitive and virginal youth she has rescued from his fanatically religious mother). There are thrilling café scenes: "Victor perambulated in the 12th and 20th arrondissement, the two quartiers where he went when alone, and wandered from bistro to bistro, a bag of books over his shoulder. Starting at seven in the evening he switched from espressos to a glass of red wine, then two, then three. Later, he returned home having written several pages of the essay he was trying to finish, having re-read Dostoevski, begun a novel or savored for the nth time a few letters by Descartes picked at random." The dialogue is riveting and credible:
Victor falls for an older woman, Agathe falls off a horse and everyone lives ambiguously ever after. It is the book's autobiographical element that has pushed sales to 81,000 copies and created a succès de scandale. "Premier roman" is dedicated to Mitterrand. The novel's fictional father plays a minor role (he is a publisher). But the search for clues about him is what makes bleary-eyed readers turn pages. As one cynical Parisian friend of mine quipped, someone could make a fortune selling crib notes indicating where the word père (father) appears. These revelations, however, are unrevealing: "Agathe and her father communicated often through silence ..." "Her father wrote nearby; one heard the sound of his pen scribbling countless annotations on loose pages, an occasional sigh and then, all of a sudden, the desire for a glass of water or a morsel of salami ..." Why all the bother? Mitterrand ruled the country like a king for 14 years, from 1981 to 1995. He was worshipped and detested in equal measure and continues to excite an extraordinary amount of academic and, even more, prurient interest among the French. Mysterious, ambiguous, intellectual, charming, cunning -- he remains an enigma, a modern-day Macchiavelli, Richelieu or Mazarin (interesting that his daughter is named Mazarine). Mitterrand died in January 1996, but he appears to have been reincarnated in his ambitious daughter. The physical resemblance is uncanny. Pingeot even bats her eyes and purses her lips like her father, note pundits with horror or delight. A few months ago, the entire nation watched when popular talk show host Michel Field interviewed Pingeot ever-so-gently on "Public," her first television appearance. Café chat flared soon afterwards when Le Figaro reported that Pingeot's publisher also published Field's first book and is awaiting another from him. Rumor has it the TV host even came up with Pingeot's brilliant title. The most memorable part of Pingeot's performance during the program was a savage attack on the press -- a peculiar way to thank journalists who had pandered to her and her publisher. It was all the more surprising given the press's remarkable discretion about Pingeot from her birth onward. Many in France had known of Pingeot's existence before 1994. She attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and took a degree in philosophy. Her mother, Anne, is a respected museum curator. But Mitterrand's power and prestige were such that the privacy of his second family was scrupulously respected, even by the notorious French paparazzi, until the ailing president himself decided to unveil Pingeot to the nation (and later requested that she be present at his funeral). She has been in the public eye ever since, a fact that did not escape her publisher's attention. The media circus was guaranteed. A day after "Premier roman" was released, Pingeot had already appeared on "Public," her novel had made the cover of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur and had been announced (and then reviewed) on the front page of Le Monde. The launch was brilliantly orchestrated by Julliard editor Betty Mialet, who admitted to Le Monde she had pruned and shaped Pingeot's manuscript. Le Monde also revealed that, in March, Mialet sent the book to the newspaper's literary section under a false name, Jeanne Reychman, ostensibly to ensure a neutral reception and establish the novel's intrinsic literary merits. Mialet's insistence that she would have published the manuscript no matter who had written it has been greeted with widespread skepticism. Even more surprising, Le Monde has been remarkably uncritical: Its lengthy review was more a sympathetic encounter with Pingeot than a balanced weighing of the book's merits. The editor in chief of the paper's literary section even managed to discern in "Premier roman" parallels not only to Françoise Sagan but also to Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Yourcenar. "Why not toss in Proust, Flaubert and Sartre while we're at it -- and above all Barbara Cartland?" asks a literary friend. Indeed! The question on millions of French lips now is: If Julliard has stooped this low, what does the future hold for French intellectual publishing? Pingeot, who "exiled" herself from Paris in April to flee the brouhaha, is due back any time. Will she have another manuscript ready -- this one perhaps dedicated to her mother? Pingeot has threatened to write as many novels as it takes -- three, four, five -- to establish herself in her own right. As it recovers from soccer euphoria, Paris is bracing itself for a long, hot literary summer.
David Downie is Salon's Paris correspondent.
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