A French Way to Yes
December 16, 2007 by wlcutter
Imagine this: you’re dating someone and the two of you are very in love (even though there’s been trouble recently, some friction), and one afternoon when you’re out for coffee, your beloved sees someone across the room, goes and says hello, and several hours later leaves with that person—not just leaves with the other person, but doesn’t even pause to say goodbye to you on the way out. Imagine that person not once calling after that sort of exit. Imagine that: how just utterly, devastatingly confused you’d feel, to say nothing of how heartbroken.
Here’s the book—nonfiction, its worth noting—that works from that premise onward. It’s Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, and if you’ve heard about it its because it came out in hardcover in the autumn of 2006 and all of the usual suspects celebrated it—Esquire, Slate, New York Times. It had, in the hardcover version (and also, thankfully, in this new paperback iteration from Mariner Books), one of the all-time best blurbs, written (of course) by John Hodgman.
Step back into that imaginary scene from before: imagine, after several years of not a single word, the lover who’d left you that day at the coffeeshop calls, out of the blue, on a Sunday. Just calls on the telephone! And she’s calling not to apologize or ask for you back or anything, anything like that, but simply to ask you to be the mystery guest at an upcoming birthday party for a “contemporary artist” (Bouillier puts the phrase in quotes, we’ll put it in quotes). Imagine it.
But here’s the deal: however you can imagine all of the above, you need Bouillier’s Mystery Guest. Not because it maps out the casual this-then-that events that transpire, but because you need his heart, you need his just overwhelming and wonderful kindness and hope and humanity. Someone named Logan Pearsall Smith said (wrote? I’m guessing wrote) “What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers,” and that phrase’ll ring like a church bell when you read Mystery Guest.
Here’s a fine sample sentence, to give you an idea (and I don’t speak French, so I don’t know how much of the musicality of the line’s due to the even and evening translation by Lorin Stein, but I’m guessing its both): “The place where the taxi dropped me off was gloomy, across from a railroad track with big concrete panels clearly designed to muffle the noise of the trains, and nothing made a sound but the streetlights, shining on a deserted corner, and in the cold they produced a uniquely tentative, peevish halo of light. I don’t know how long I must have stood there, tapping my foot on the sidewalk, stuck and at a loss, facing the small bare metal door.” A tentative, peevish halo of light! Can you believe that? And in that second line, can’t you hear this weird sort of echo back to (or maybe even companion with) Eudora Welty’s single best sentence (and this reviewer’s nominee for best sentence ever written): “She must have been lonesome and slow all her life, the way things would take her by surprise.” (It’s from “A Piece of News,” from Curtain of Green, though you should just buy the Collected if you don’t have it already)?
(That’s at random, by the way: there are fine, wonderfully and strangely detailed sentences on every single page of the book.)
Almost all the reviews of this book, when it came out last year, bore some mention of the fact that the book is, in the end, remarkably positive, and I’d like to echo but modify that compliment here. It’s not simply that the book is positive, or that it ends on an upward arch, so to speak: its that the positivity, the yes the book strides toward (from page 1, basically, but certainly, especially, in the last 40 pages or so) is incredibly earned, is a positivity and yes that’s come through fracture and darkness and doubt. I’ll herein admit that I’m a huge sucker for not simply happy endings, but positive endings—all the books I like the best have, somewhere in their endings, some glimmer of hope, even if the glimmer’s so tiny you’ve got to squint and almost lie to yourself to see it. And I’m happy to report that The Mystery Guest is now among those books I like best, and the hope at the end of this book is nothing you’ve got to squint even a little for: it’s right there, large and waiting to hit you, eyes wide open.
