On growing out of the pulps - Anahid Nersessian in NYRB:

‘However, as the poet Jean-Marie Gleize puts it in his 2011 collection Tarnac, un acte préparatoire (Tarnac, a Preparatory Act), the reality is far more foreboding. When books are used as “evidence of opinions” to incriminate their authors or readers, and when any relationship between two or more people, “even love or friendship,” can be said to constitute a gang or a cell, we are not seeing a democratic government take national security too far; we are seeing an authoritarian state show its true face. “It would be illusory,” Gleize writes, “to demand that this procedural regime be applied in/manners less broad or less brutal: it is designed to be/applied precisely as it is.”’

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‘The novel’s center of gravity, however, is Bruno Lacombe, a once-prominent French radical and associate of Debord’s who lives, or so he says, underground, in a series of primeval caves beneath the forests of the Guyenne. Now in his seventies, Bruno first came to the region after becoming disillusioned with politics following the student uprisings of 1968. “None of these eruptions,” Sadie notes, “had resulted in the overthrow of capitalism in any of the advanced industrial nations of the entire European continent—not a single one.” “In the wake of the colossal failure of leftist revolt” Bruno moved to the countryside, convinced that capitalism could not be directly dismantled but instead had to be abandoned, and another way of life built outside and beyond it.’

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‘This description serves pretty well when it comes to the modern American novel. Think of Don DeLillo’s Jack and Babette Gladney in White Noise, a husband and wife who remain radically disconnected from their environment and from each other, even as a toxic chemical spill threatens to obliterate any boundary between their bodies and the poisoned air. In White Noise, as in DeLillo’s greatest novel, Underworld, history itself is the main character, if by “history” we understand the mood or tone of a distinctive time and place—the pharmaceutical haze and suburban dissociation of the 1980s, the nuclear dread and crumbling innocence of the postwar period.
Kushner often cites DeLillo as an influence, but Creation Lake most clearly bears the imprint of a handful of European writers, including the Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini and the French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette. The first chapter of Manchette’s 1976 novel Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest (Three to Kill) begins, “And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now,” before launching into a description of Manchette’s protagonist, Georges Gerfaut, a middle-class nobody caught up in murder.’

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‘Spy and detective novels, like all forms of genre fiction, thrive on the opacity of their characters, who are always more type than individual. What do we know about James Bond other than his small arsenal of flat habits (martinis, promiscuity, quips)? As Dashiell Hammett said of Sam Spade, he “had no original” but is rather “a dream man” reduced almost entirely to two things: being “a hard and shifty fellow” and a prolific drinker. Of Philip Marlowe, another lush, Raymond Chandler said he “just grew out of the pulps. He was no one person.”’

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‘The mistreatment of women is a subtle but powerful current running through Creation Lake. When Sadie visits Le Moulin, she finds the Moulinards have created a society that seems far from revolutionary. The women on the commune are cooking and looking after children while the men discuss politics and tactics and work in the library. When Sadie confronts Pascal, he shrugs her off. It just happened that way, he says, and “we don’t have a magic solution.” Sadie later hears from Nadia, who says she was thrown out of Le Moulin for being too old and that Pascal is a womanizer particularly interested in young girls. “They talk about their supposed ethics,” Nadia sneers, “but none of it applies to him.”’

Read the article here.

We all grew out of the pulps; thanks to capitalism or whatever name we would like to give the system.

The utopian place, on a second look, is always a bit less utopian than the devotees hoped for.
The disappointment is part of the utopia.

Talking about ethics might be better than not talking about it, even when the talk is just a tool of seduction.