When an old Soviet satellite wipes out a Parisian hypermarket, the explosion kills a landlord and gives his tenant, Gerard Fulmard, a temporary reprieve from paying his rent. Despite living only a few hundred yards from the obliterated hypermarket, Fulmard––protagonist of Jean Echenoz’s Command Performance––prefers to find out what’s happening by switching on his television and watching the news. Touching on themes of the secondhand and the artificial while referencing real locations and events, Echenoz’s winding novel echoes Fulmard’s eventual emergence as a private detective for whom “polysemy allows for anything and everything.”

The initial explosion unfolds in the slow and mesmerizing way of all televised events. Information trickles out, experts weigh in, pundits mouth off. One of the pundits is spokesman for Frank Terrail, chairman of the Independent Popular Federation, who blames the explosion on the “permissive, elitist, laxist ideology” promoted by an opposing party. Bernard Couplet, deputy for that party, the Movement for Democratic Momentum, is attacked with allusions to his private life and in return takes a shot at the shadowy figures behind Terrail’s IPF. The news moves on: weighing in are eyewitnesses to the explosion, a government minister, an ex-astronaut, an “Euhemerist druid in full dress shouting that it was always the same story, he has shouted his guts out warning of a catastrophe and no one listened.”

As an unemployed flight attendant undergoing mandatory counseling, Fulmard is in a vulnerable state. He becomes entranced by a sign for the Duluc Detective agency, “to which no soul with even the slightest romance, mine included, could possibly remain indifferent.” This sign, it turns out, really exists, at 10 rue du Louvre in Paris. Echenoz is something of a geographic writer, fascinated both by exotic locales and the mundane places of his everyday life. Fulmard winds up becoming a private detective himself, figuring his “bland physiognomy” could work in his favor. It helps that he’s already set up a company, the “Fulmard Assistance Bureau.” All he needs to do is append a line to his ad about “Disputes & Debt Collection” and he’s good to go. When he checks the news again he learns that Terrail’s wife has been kidnapped. Fulmard doesn’t take the case so much as get blackmailed into the intrigue.

Command Performance is largely a book of sketches, as when Fulmard fumbles with a pen, struggling to converse with a potential client—a great depiction of loserdom reminiscent of John Dolan’s Pleasant Hell (2004). The sketches swirl outward, away from the plot: the narrator announces we are now going to take a break to indulge in a mini-biography of a side character or the story of a Dutch woman cannibalized by a Japanese student in the same apartment block, which evidently really happened, another moment in which Echenoz’s fascination with the minute details of real locations again spurs on the novel. 

Echenoz’s concern with artifice extends to the novel’s crime elements, with ideas offered and developed or discarded on a whim. Fulmard is framed for murder by his first real client, the mysterious La Mothe-Marlaux. Later, a different character blackmails him with video from the Mothe-Marlaux incident. The timeline doesn’t add up: it’s only after his confession to his court-mandated doctor that anyone even thinks to use him as a patsy, so what’s the connection? As it turns out, La Mothe-Marlaux has been sitting behind him the entire time. La Mothe-Marlaux, no longer needed, gets up and leaves. Raymond Chandler’s novels had so much plot that he famously couldn’t say who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep; Command Performance seems to be taking this oversight and running with it as a guiding principle. If you care about how this all fits together, the novel seems to be saying, that’s on you. 

Echenoz based Fulmard on Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Eugene Tarpon—both are fumbling detectives in over their heads in a world of seedy business—but Echenoz’s lightness of touch and ironic voice dampen the noirish tone that makes Manchette a master. That’s not to say Command Performance isn’t worthwhile. There’s a depth to the situations in which the characters find themselves even if things fail to add up, but the result does not satisfy in the way a more straightforward novel would.

+++

Jean Echenoz has published twelve novels to date. His novel Cherokee was awarded the Prix Médicis in 1983 and his novel I’m Gone (Je m’en vais) won the Prix Goncourt in 1999. He lives in Paris. 

+

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Raymond Roussel. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. His translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat is available from NYRB Poets. He lives in New York.

+

Adam McPhee is a Canadian writer. He has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and he writes a newsletter, Adam’s Notes, on substack. He lives in northern Alberta.