Rond-point
"All changes. And youth and love. The boat has floated through the arch of the willows and is now under the bridge. (...) We shall not meet again." (Virginia Woolf)
“The streetlights are on, the moonlight is out, and the chemicals are ripping us open. Our winds of pleasure, breezy, like the children we will be. Children who must return home eventually. And so we go home, to Ménilmontant and to Belleville Park, with its platform overlooking the city. Every pleasure there you could possibly imagine, in cumulation. Our pleasure here, shaped as hills, constantly exploding with lindens. The linden trees have grown tall enough to partially obstruct our view. That park’s access road, this pleasure’s fast lane, Rue des Envierges, like a love tunnel, emptying us backward, returning the roundabout to itself, a black-lit traffic circle we know better than our lives. Our life. Its love. The breaks. We are only weights and fantasies. We are only heavy pride, heavy hate, heavy guilt, and terrible fear. And then we are a feathery yearning. With chemicals, we give in too quickly, to the fantasies, the rushes we were bound to bow down to eventually. Inevitably. Predeterminably. Weight slips away. The speed of our age gets chilling. Thins us. The preempted arrival of our futures feels great. The cold wind creates a sniffling. Voices carry on it. Our own voices. Memories and future tellings. Our sniffing mixes with the huffing of how we cope.” (Will Mountain Cox, Roundabout, p. 139-140)
*
I think I understand.
To a degree.
Our minds are potent things, capable of providing us with joy, relief, but also tremendous amounts of suffering. It’s the refuge of poets, but also of people like me, who feel hemmed in life sometimes - but who doesn’t.
I encountered Will Mountain Cox’s work through a missed opportunity: a reading at the American Library in Paris that I couldn’t attend because I was severely burnt out. Snippets from his novel would pop up here and there on IG from trusted alt-lit enthusiasts’ accounts and he seemed to follow - and to be followed by - people whose work I respected immensely. So I ordered it from the trusted Red Wheelbarrow in the 5th and started it right after a string of harrowing but beautiful reads: Blake Butler’s Molly and Jon Lindsey’s Suicide: An Anthology.
I came into Roundabout thinking I would be told about people doing ketamine and having sex in public places and hating themselves for it - but only on the inside, because the pantomime of clout demands that one remains unperturbed even in the face of abjection -, because that’s what a lot of the current short fiction is about. It doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just repetitive. Interestingly enough, there are indeed drugs and sex in public places in Roundabout, as the previously quoted passage attests, but Cox has managed to use the topoi as conveyors of the hushed tenderness of nostalgia, rather than the expected instrument of narrative progress.
With Roudabout, Cox accomplishes something very few, even after a career of several years, have managed to do: he writes an addictive text whose coherence and tone are sustained all the way through its 170 pages, while deftly drawing from the structural and reflective strategies explored by ultracontemporary American writers: metafiction, intertextuality, and the aesthetics of discrepancy and reticence.
The novel is about friendship, love, memory, growing old, being afraid, losing touch, and many other things that young people experience in the face of time. The members of the group of friends the novel centers on weather individual losses and collective moments of pleasure through incisive chapters that all take place in a bar situated in the most Parisian neighborhood there is: Belleville, in le 20e arrondissement de Paris.
There’s a lot of Woolf’s Waves in Roundabout, the curve of the typically French landmark - do they even exist in the US? - offering a dynamic urban alternative to the broken linearity of the shore. The novel’s structure also somehow echoes Woolf’s. Cox, however, lets speech and thoughts disseminate through contact, giving the impression that a touch, a word, a look are signs given to speak and become the focus of the narration in the economy on the novel.
Cox’s mastery of the narrative form particularly stuns in the chapter entitled “Eli repeats his favorite story” that perfectly blends a multilayered embedded story with the narrator’s - and the audience’s - commentary both on the story itself and the way it is told.
I feel compelled to say that the chapter “Matt and Marie get back together”, which accurately describes the group of friends popping pills for old time’s sake, is the best-written in the novel. The one dedicated to Eli’s story is close second. The protracted violence that looms in the latter over a vulnerable male body unabashedly inhabited in all its complexity by Eli - and which is felt as a threat, impossible to reckon with, by his male friends, deep within the most subterranean parts of themselves1 -, blows up in the former as the group, barely coming down from their high, watches a man getting his face bashed in from afar without intervening:
“And then, with the night at its quietest, its most memorable, a stranger appeared out of the deep dark of Rue des Cascades like bleakness was his queue, printing wild and checking over his shoulder as he entered the roundabout. At the dead center of the circumcribed circle, he tripped and splayed. And then so appeared three shadowy figures, clearly in pursuit, who were, the three, triplets in the dark. They set upon the stranger, who from his splaying had made himself fetal. None of the eight friends spoke and neither did the roundabout. The three men, like boys with their ball, began to kick at the stranger’s head. The kicks grew harder, as if they were trying to ruin their plaything. And harder. Harder. Nothing stopping them. Nothing getting in the way. Nothing intervening. No one so stupid as to get involved. (145)
Stunning.
On a more personal note, the thirty-something Parisian that I am who’s lived in the 20th arrondissement for a while was surprised by how tenderly and uncompromisingly Cox portrays the dynamics and paradoxes of the Eastern Parisians who populate his novel. The great accuracy with which he describes these grown children who, while playing house and drinking beer, feel like their youth is on its tail end, undoubtedly owes to an astute sense of observation and a true form of empathy that only great writers possess. The French language, usually so clunky in books written in English, is eerily idiomatic: even the insults and the Parisian dialectal specificities that most Paris-born novelists get wrong are on point. A true feat.
I’ll leave you with one of the most heartbreaking lines of the novel - there are many - that I’ve quoted earlier : “Children (…) must return home eventually.”
The narrator describes how Jude, after being robbed of twenty euros by a stranger with a knife, goes to bed ashamed, “shivering and somehow hard” and touches himself without being able to fully comprehend why (p. 104). This is one of the most powerful passages in the book.