Erotic Youths Adrift in the Paris Underworld

Between literary gimmicks and the novel there has been a long and cozy friendship. From Anonymous’ “Primary Colors,” which presented an author incognito, all the way back to Daniel Defoe’s “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” which purported to be the actual account of a shipwrecked sailor “written by himself,” writers--and publishers--have delighted in playing with the straightforward conventions of the author’s relationship to his work, as though the more elusive the identity of the writer, the more magical the fiction (and the more newsworthy its appearance in the marketplace).

“Lila Says,” a new French novel, comes cagily packaged with such a story. An attorney, acting on behalf of Chimo, its author, delivered to a publisher two red school notebooks. The handwriting was crabbed and much amended; a facsimile page is included for authenticity. The publishers couldn’t decide whether they were the victims of a hoax; though as victims go, they doubtless feel they come out rather ahead, having received a book, they claim, of “astonishing literary quality.”

Straight off, the reader notes that the copyright is held not by Chimo, but by “Plon,” who was the author of record when the novel was published in 1996 in France. Plon as in plonger, perhaps, to plunge down or into or (as a noun) a diver? A suitable pseudonym for the author of a book that dives into the underworld of the Old Oak housing projects outside Paris, where the 19-year-old North African narrator, Chimo, crosses paths with 16-year-old Lila, “an angel with a whore’s mouth on her.”

Lila’s openly lascivious talk--she invites Chimo to examine her intimately on Page 2--vaguely invokes “The Story of O,” a notable, once-anonymous novel; yet beyond following precedent to obscure the writer’s identity, the gimmick of the mysterious youthful author seems unbelievable here: Chimo’s voice is too confidently crafted to be that of a 19-year-old who claims never to have finished reading a book.

The quality of the writing, which has been given a nicely cadenced, plausibly informal English analog by an uncredited translator, makes it difficult to dismiss “Lila Says” as the unmitigated male fantasy it intermittently is. In places the novel invokes Larry Clark’s “Kids”; its sensibility often seems, like that of the moviemaker, to belong to an older man, or at least an outsider who has certain one-dimensional ideas about street life of disenfranchised urban adolescents.

Consider Lila, the angelic whore who is romanticized throughout. Gifted with “the face of a lily, of a young saint,” Lila has “a cloud of gold on her head.” She is raised by her aunt (herself once a famous sensualist) and talks about sex in virtually every scene she inhabits. Whether the talk reflects real experience, or is invented to attract Chimo, or is assumed as a cover for her underlying loneliness--or some of all of these--the reader never wholly understands. Lila is undeniably erotic; yet her lack of inner life, of life unrelated to sex, infuses the eroticism with a quality that is desperate and unconvincing.

Chimo, by contrast, is presented with more reality. He has context: an abandoning father, a cleaning-lady mother. Painfully poor, he sells blood and snatches purses. He experiences his world as dark and meaningless; but at least (unlike Lila) he experiences it. Writing is not always effortless for him; yet even when “it won’t come out on the paper,” he knows that “it’s in there somewhere though, it runs all through my skin maybe other places too.” His greatest liberation is Lila, whose beguiling voice “still sings in my head hours later, porn or not I don’t know anymore.”

Porn or not: Possibly, in the end, the issue is of less consequence if the reader takes Lila more allegorically, as Chimo’s creative muse, the figure who inspires him, like a true writer, to see “words sentences bursting everywhere like shooting stars.”