Theme: Paris

Well, friends, I am back fresh from Paris and I must tell you, I do love that city. I love most things about it - the coffee, the wine, the food, the architecture, the pace, the culture, they way they snub their noses at silly American diets that prohibit dairy and bread, the way you never have to wait more than five minutes for any metro, the coffee, the wine, the cheese... - but there is an exception. I am not in love with their bathrooms. Sure, they have some beauties, no doubt. Space wise, I often find them lacking. And sometimes even confusing. Like the one at a cafe I slid into midday. I was waving my hands under, over, and in the general vicinity of the faucet. I looked for secret bricks to push on the wall, I pulled the faucet, and I even thought about giving up and recognizing that I was merely a defeated, stupid American. Just as I dropped my head in shame, I noticed the pedal on the floor. Eh, voila! Clean hands, clean heart. Yes, I am thankful for the Parisian toilet when I find one, but I wouldn't want to live in one.

Which brings me to Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Bathroom, a slight, comical novel composed of three sections with a total of one hundred seventy paragraphs. Seemingly this might be meagre to be considered a novel, much less an engaging one, but it does, and it does so swiftly and slyly. Our narrator is Parisian. He is a researcher. He has a girlfriend, Edmondsson. He wants to live in his bathroom. Yes, his bathroom. This is not your typical desire for a functioning twenty-seven year old male, but after a few concerned attempts from family and friends, everyone seems to let it go. Edmondsson, the girlfriend that he truly seems to love, rarely addresses it. The fact that most of her conversations with her boyfriend take place in a bathroom doesn't warrant so much as a "Uh, could we step out of the bathroom for this discussion?" or "It's hard to take you seriously when you're sitting fully clothed in the bathtub." It's not that we learn so much about what drove him to secluding himself in the bathroom, but it's how Toussaint describes the narrator's reaction to people's hilarious and feeble attempts at drawing him out of the bathroom that gives us insight into who he is. Paragraph 6 of PARIS(part one) exemplifies this at its best:

Mom brought me pastries. Sitting on the bidet with the open box wedged between her legs, she arranged the pastries on a soup plate. I thought she seemed ill at ease, she's been avoiding my eyes ever since she came in. She raised her head with a weary sadness, made as if to say something but didn't, picked out the eclair, and bit into it. You need some distraction, she told me, sports, I don't know. She wiped the corners of her mouth with her glove. There's something suspicious about the need to be diverted, I replied. When I added, almost smiling, that there was nothing I feared less than diversions, she saw there was no use arguing with me and, mechanically, held out a napolean.

Toussaint's humor is not to be underestimated. It washes over the narrative, making it fluid and drowning out many of the reader's questions. What shakes the narrator into self-doubt about residing in his bathroom, is an invitation from the Austrian Embassy to a soiree. He has no idea how this happened, perhaps through work, but his resolve begins to crack as paragraph 10 of PARIS shows us:

Seated on the edge of the bathtub, I was explaining to Edmondsson that perhaps it was not very healthy, at age twenty-seven going on twenty-nine, to live more or less shut up in a bathtub. I ought to take some risk, I said, looking down and stroking the enamel of the bathtub, the risk of compromising quietude of my abstract life for...I did not finish my sentence.

And we don't need him to. Because at that moment, we feel for him. We don't know why he is there, but we understand his struggle. This book reminded me vaguely of a modern day version of Raymond Queneau's The Last Days with the Parisian angst of the male protagonist, the element of repetition and the reluctance to participate fully in society. No wonder Queneau popped into my mind because like The Bathroom, The Last Days is also published by Dalkey Archive Press(which, by the way, is a stellar small press).

Where as Queneau's protagonist, Vincent, wanders around the streets of Paris, Toussaint's young man decides to take off for Italy without mention to anyone and without anything but the clothes he is wearing. In short snippets, we see him interact with his surroundings and the various people from the Hotel that he sees daily. He is capable of life, even if he does it in nontraditional fits of courage. He establishes a routine that forces him to function on his own and interact. In paragraph 22 of HYPOTENUSE(part two), we see that he develops friendly terms with the bartender and actually even enjoys it:

Little by little, I began to make friends with the barman. We exchanged nods whenever we met on the stairs. Occasionally, when I went for my late-afternoon coffee, we'd have a conversation. We talked about soccer, automobile racing. The absence of a common language did not bother us; on cycling, for example, we could go on forever. Moser, he'd say. Merckx, I'd remark, after a little silence. Coppi, he'd say, Fausto Coppi. I'd stir my spoon in the coffee, nodding, thoughtful. Bruyere, I'd murmur. Bruyere? he'd say. Yes, yes, Bruyere. He seemed unconvinced. I thought the conversation at an end, but just as I was preparing to leave the counter, he grabbed me by the arm and said, Gimondi. Van Springel, I replied. Planckaert, I added. Dierieckx de Vlaeminck and his brother, Eric. What could anyone say to that? He gave up. I paid for the coffee and went upstairs to my room.

He continues on trying to do the little things in life while he ventures out of his hotel room - he buys a dart board, underwear, he takes phone calls from Edmondsson in the hall, he walks the streets. We begin to wonder why he can't do this in Paris. But we understand him. This is testament to Toussaint's amazing ability to convey exactly the right amount of information and to do it succinctly. So succinctly, in fact, that there is not a word wasted. The style is plain, yet literary. The humor is subtle with perfect pitch. Before too long, we are thinking that maybe we would have the courage to take off just like this, without warning or plans.

Not to say that Toussaint's character gives us the answer he doesn't. In fact, things grow tense and bizarre with Edmondsson in Italy. She returns to Paris and he stays in Italy, becoming ill and eventually landing in a hospital where he befriends his doctor and his wife. They have dinner and pay tennis together. And finally, when he realizes that he truly knows the hotel he escaped to, he returns to Paris and his bathroom, his life with Edmondsson. There is hope at the end of the novel. The reader senses a slow shift back to normalcy, his desire to go to the soiree at the Austrian Embassy, to escape from his escape. And that is precisely what is so compelling about this book - no matter how bizarre it seems, we get it. We see Toussaint's extreme analogy and how it can parallel fears and escapes within our own constraints. And he does it so delicately and with such wit, it's difficult to not love this character, to not love this book.

This may seem like a strange selection to represent the current theme of Paris, especially since half of the novel takes place in Italy, but it's the Parisian angst that is captured to odd perfection here. And thanks to Dalkey Archive for bringing more of Toussaint's work into publication. He is a modern writer with a pioneering style that we can not only enjoy, but may even lead us to a little self-examination with healthy dose of levity.

For more on Dalkey Archive's collection of Toussaint's work, check out Front Table, where Martin Riker, Associate Director of Dalkey Archive Press, blogs about their process for publishing Jean-Philippe Toussaint's work.

The Bathroom
By Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis
Dallkey Archive Press
Paperback
102 Pages
ISBN: 9781564785183
$12.95