PLAYBOY, by Constance Debré. Translated by Holly James.
The trilogy of autobiographical novels by the French writer Constance Debré could be described — reductively — as a challenging yet empowering coming-out journey, the story of a middle-aged woman who lost everything to find herself. But Debré has no interest in portraying life as a series of events in a familiar psychological progression. She is done with the kinds of books she read as a child, “stories of a world that lived in stories,” as she writes in “Playboy” — the first book in the trilogy and the second to be translated into English by Holly James. Turning our experiences into tidy stories “ends up warping our understanding of life and what we expect from it.” The point of literature, for Debré, is to force the reader into immediate, visceral reality.
Role play based on inherited expectations is precisely what Debré’s narrator, Constance, wants to avoid. She ends her long marriage to a man, abandons her career as a lawyer, begins having affairs with women and refuses to justify her choices even when she risks losing custody of her son.
When a child psychologist asks her if she loves her child, Constance cannot bring herself to speak because she knows this woman would never understand her definition of love: “I looked at her red Lancel bag and her Hermès watch with the double strap and told myself it wasn’t even worth answering.” At the heart of “Playboy” is controlled rage at the materialism so deeply entrenched in our society that it applies even to the way people use words, treating “love” and “sex” and “motherhood” like commodities, things that have value only insofar as they offer access to something else: cachet, financial stability, power.
Debré’s disgust with conventional social structures is often funny. Married life is “calm. Like a bomb shelter.” Other parents obsess about what tiles to put in their bathrooms and where to go on vacation, even though “they all go to the same places.” Besides, Constance thinks, “vacations are such a pain in the ass.”
For Constance, focusing on the body is the way out of this madness: “I swim and I don’t think of anything but the movements, my body extending stretching gliding.” The lack of punctuation, typical of Debré, pulls the reader into the motion with the urgency and immediacy of speech.
The physicality of Debré’s language is strongest when she describes Constance’s first sexual experiences with women. Debré evokes desire with a nonlinear jumble of sensual moments that resonate more with the body than with the mind: “And even her ears, and her fingers in my mouth, and the hours and the hours, and Your boobs are amazing, and I bite her neck, and my tongue on her tongue, and her clean-shaven, delicate skin.”
Playboy magazine was famous for creating the kind of pornography that turns women into desensitized marionettes. Debré’s “Playboy,” on the other hand, treats female bodies as vehicles of sensation, existing both to give and to receive pleasure: “Breasts are made for hands to feel, an ass is made to be pressed up against.” This kind of objectification frees Constance and her partners to be pure bodies, unburdened by socially constructed identities.
It’s refreshing that Debré allows sex to matter solely as a physical experience; Constance’s sexual awakening does not heal her or make her whole. Rather, her affairs with women become a new kind of cage, one more anxious attachment that leaves no “space for emptiness.” “Playboy” is ruthless in its depiction of social conventions: romance, family, career, stability. Yet there is immense relief in Debré’s refusal to be consoled by the world, a glimmer — which grows stronger in the later novels, “Love Me Tender” and “Name” — of the possibility for something else.
PLAYBOY | By Constance Debré | Translated by Holly James | Semiotext(e) | 172 pp. | Paperback, $17.95
