Book Review : The Terror of Vanishing Personality

The Mustache by Emmanuel Carrere, translated by Lani Goodman (Scribners: $17.95, cloth; $7.95 paper; 146 pages.)

“The Mustache” is a light, dry novel of the utmost terror. It is a terror of the mind. It is the terror a particle of matter might feel when introduced--at a wine tasting, say, or a chamber music concert--to a particle of anti-matter. Or vice a versa.

Emmanuel Carrere, a young and utterly adept French writer, begins his book where any good terror story ought to begin: in easy normality. The hero is a young Paris architect who has the nicest of lives, the kind of life that successful young French professionals manage with an air of being thoroughly on top of a pleasant world.

With his equally relaxed wife, Agnes, he occupies a tasteful apartment--the author doesn’t call it that but he gets us to think it, which is a measure of his skill--goes out to dinner or the movies or to visit friends, and takes interesting vacations. When it comes time to vote, they have a comfortably non-tragic choice between socialist and conservative candidates who have been around, seemingly, for generations, and can be counted on to upset nothing.

An Innocent Beginning

As the tale begins, the hero--he is not given a name, which comes to seem suspicious--is in the bathtub wondering out loud whether to shave off his mustache. He has talked about it several times with Agnes, who is in the next room leafing through a magazine. On the whole, she likes the mustache but now, on her way out to do a brief errand, she laughs and tells him to remove it if he wants to.

By the time she returns, he is dressed and ready to go out to dinner with friends. He is exhilarated and a trifle nervous about the mushroom-colored space on his upper lip; what will Agnes say? In fact, she says nothing.

They drive over to the apartment of Serge and Veronique. Agnes’ failure to comment irritates him; perhaps she is playing a joke. But the friends say nothing either; are they part of the joke? By the time they get home, the hero makes a scene; surely this has gone far enough. What has? she demands, looking blank. The mustache. What mustache?

He never had one, she insists. They are both thoroughly upset by now; each apparently wondering if something serious is going on. Agnes telephones the friends and tells them that if she has enlisted them in a joke she now releases them; and does her husband have a mustache? Obviously not, they reply; astonished at a 2 a.m. call about such a thing.

The hero produces photos of a recent holiday in Java. He sees a mustache, Agnes doesn’t. He goes to his office next day. Neither his partner, Jerome, nor anyone else comments on his bare upper lip. Has Agnes been talking to them? he demands. No.

Rage and Hysteria

At home that night, there is mutual rage, then mutual hysteria. While lovemaking follows, heightened by fear. “It’s you, it’s you,” Agnes cries out at the climatic moment.

The cry is the pivotal event, turning a puzzle that was comic at first, and then baffling, into something worse. “It’s you!,” but is it? Identity, seemingly as solid as a comfortable Western European life, is in fact quite as fragile. And Agnes and her husband are struggling over it. One or the other must prevail; one must be annihilated.

The Puzzle Resumes

After that black metaphysical flash, the puzzle resumes and proliferates. The book goes back to its dry dispassionate tone, with a touch of comedy here and there. The metaphysical questions recede, though its shadow hangs over everything. What takes its place is a kinked and undulating mystery.

Reasonable people, Agnes and her husband cling for a while to a reasonable answer. Maybe one or both of them is having a breakdown; they will both see a psychiatrist. But identity is life and it cannot be settled by compromise.

Jerome, the partner, joins the others in insisting that the hero never had a mustache. That is a momentary relief; the hero can accept, at least theoretically, the notion that the breakdown is his alone. But what about the Java photos?

There are no photos, Agnes tells him, and they’ve never been to Java. Next, she insists that they have no friends named Serge and Veronique. Next, she announces that the hero’s father, whom they’d just visited, has been dead for years. She weeps as she says these things, as if finding new and lethal symptoms in a husband who is mortally ill.

But is he really mad?, the hero asks himself. Or is Agnes? But if she is, why does Jerome support her? Why did their friends, whose existence she now denies, back up her story? Is it a plot to drive him mad or even to kill him?

Escape Route

He flees to Hong Kong and then to Macao. He lives a minimal and mechanical tourist routine in a small hotel. He is gradually disappearing even to himself. Then one day Agnes is suddenly there, insisting that she has been there all along and that they are simply taking a vacation.

The ending need not be revealed. It answers no questions. The mystery is unsolved though, on a material level, we may have our suspicions. The larger question about identity remains, floating darkly.

After the rapid and intriguing switches of the first part, the Hong Kong and Macao sections seem rather empty. Carrere cannot devise an ending to match his spectacular beginning, but he doesn’t really need to.