Look at this slender, handsome thing! The cover effortlessly beats the hell out of that pastel embarrassment that encloses "Prep." Recommended to me six months ago by a friend, "The Mystery Guest" was devoured today over the course of two subway rides and a half-hour dinner break. Book covers are important. They ARE. One must feel confident reading a book in public, and I'm not ashamed to say that I felt great reading "The Mystery Guest" on the subway today. Commuters were peeking at my book left and right, and I felt like I knew an important little secret. I felt sorry for my peers for not being in on it.
Breakups are bullshit- humiliating and devastating for the dumped because, really, when it comes down to it, being abandonned by a loved one teaches us that we're "a less exemplary person than [we had] thought." The first few pages floored me- I can't recall having read such a true description of the emotional wreckage that follows such a blow:
"I was home in the middle of the afternoon, and it was cold out, and I'd gone to sleep in all my clothes, wrapped up in a blanket, the way I generally did when I was home by myself. Cold and oblivion were all I was looking for at the time, but this didn't worry me. Sooner or later, I knew, I'd rejoin the world of the living. Just not yet. I felt I had seen enough. Beings, things, landscapes...I had enough to last me for the next two hundred years and saw no reason to go hunting for new material. I didn't want any trouble."
The above, by the way, is five years after the nameless Gregoire has been left, wordlessly, by his girlfriend. If he doesn't want any trouble, he gets it anyway, as the phone rings and it's the heartbreaker herself, calling suddenly after five years, not to offer any explanations or to ask to see him (or even to acknowledge their past at all), but rather to invite him to a birthday party--for a woman he's never met--where he is to play the role of "the mystery guest". What follows (as Gregoire prepares for the party and spends his rent money on a vintage bottle of wine that no one will, in fact, ever drink) is a frantic, Woody Allen-esque internal monologue bursting with hope, imagined reconciliations, speculation, faux significance, and, most importantly, fiction-like logic:
"For once I wasn't cooking the data. Not this time. Appearances never deceive (I told myself), they are their own meanings and there's nothing to look for behind them, and I rejoiced, and the reasons for her call rose up more and more vividly and gloriously into view. And the thing was, the reasons had nothing to do with her! Because it wasn't as if SHE had decided to call late in the afternoon on a Sunday and send me a coded message. No one was that roundabout, I told myself. At least not that pointlessly roundabout. So there had to be something else--call it a force--a force seeking some means of self-expression, struggling to give me a sign, and unbeknownst to her this something had told her to pick up the phone and dial my number at that moment, of all moments, the meaning of which apparent coincidence only I could discern. Yes, I was convinced that this had to be the explanation: for reasons unknown to me, but which might have had something to do with the death of Michel Leiris, something in her clicked and, taking advantage of her need to find a 'mystery guest,' the force stole this chance to slip her hand into mine, to wave a handkerchief like a prisoner locked in a tower."
Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, this narrative is really concerned with the consoling power of fiction, with the sometimes silly but always very real need to find symbols and portents in the everyday, to create meaning where there is little or none, and to ultimately make our messy lives feel as though they're at least heading towards some sort of satisfying, insightful, and fated ending. What's astounding is that we actually get a satisfying, insightful ending, but I won't give it away. I'll leave you instead with a hilarious bit about turtlenecks:
"Since I'd always hated turtlenecks worn as undershirts and despised the men who wore them as the lowest kind of pseudo-sportsmen with, as they say, the lamest kind of collar, I started wearing turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left. Basically, I never took them off. No doubt this was magical thinking on my part (if I never took them off, nothing would ever take off on me); at any rate, these turtleneck-undershirts erupted in my life without my noticing until it was too late and I was under their curse. You could even say they'd INFLICTED themselves on me, so that now I hardly remembered the wind on my neck, which is the very feeling of freedom itself. But if that was the price I had to pay, I told myself, so be it. We brick ourselves up in prisons of our own devising, we spend our lives losing touch with ourselves, disappearing behind what negates us."
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