On January 5, 2019, a group of people began breaking down the front door of a ministry building on the Rue de Grenelle in central Paris. Security rushed the government spokesperson at the time, Benjamin Griveaux, out through a side exit soon after the intruders took apart the wooden entrance using a commandeered forklift. Their use of heavy machinery had a touch of symbolism. Among the perpetrators were members of France’s gilets jaunes (“yellow vest”) movement, named for the high-visibility vests typically worn by construction workers. Demonstrators had donned the reflective neon garments in a show of working-class pride. January 5th had marked the eighth week of protests against Emmanuel Macron’s economic policies; across the country that day, fifty thousand gilets jaunes took to the streets, facing off against tear gas, water cannons, and other dispersal tactics employed by French riot police. Griveaux, who had earlier called the idea of meeting the protesters’ demands “unthinkable,” said on French television about the break-in, “It wasn’t me who was attacked, it was the republic.”
I learned about the Rue de Grenelle incident after Googling “France, January 5, 2019,” the date on which “Vengeance Is Mine,” the new novel by the French writer Marie NDiaye, begins. NDiaye’s latest tale, a story of class conflict embedded within a psychological thriller, is scattered with interpretive hints, clues to the crimes of contemporary French society. Though it starts with a date on the calendar, the story works like a map. The novel is dotted with coördinates around Bordeaux—neighborhood and street names—which NDiaye drops into the story like pins, marking the poor sections of the city where domestic workers live and the rich ones where they work. By the last page, I was newly fluent in the social geography of Bordeaux and its environs, well traversed in the French city’s throughways of privilege and its dead ends of precarity.
The novel, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, opens on that January day—with another tense office visit. A man walks into the struggling law practice of Maître (as attorneys are known in France) Susane. He looks familiar to her, and so he should. His name is Gilles Principaux. He is known throughout Bordeaux as the husband of Marlyne Principaux, a woman in jail for drowning her three small children in a bathtub in the couple’s home in the affluent suburb of Le Bouscat. The case is all over the news. Yet Maître Susane suspects she knows Gilles, who wants to hire her to defend his wife, from somewhere else. She is almost certain that he is the son of a wealthy family who once employed her mother to iron their laundry. She recalls being “enraptured” by the teen-age boy, who had invited her into his bedroom, leaving her “at once dazed at the honor and anxious to prove herself worthy of that distinction.” Why, then, upon seeing him again, thirty-two years later, “did she feel as if her life were in danger?”
When Sasha, the protagonist of “Good Morning, Midnight,” Jean Rhys’s novel from the nineteen-thirties, is offered a “beautiful” room in a hotel in Paris, she scoffs at the qualifier, thinking to herself, “Never tell the truth about this business of rooms, because it would bust the roof off everything and undermine the whole social system. All rooms are the same. All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair and perhaps a bidet. A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that’s all any room is.” In “Vengeance Is Mine,” rubbing shoulders with the rich means sharing a room with wolves—in Maître Susane’s case, with one wolf in particular. Her memories of what exactly happened inside that bedroom are cloudy, but she recalls the rich teen-aged boy asking her what she thought of the house, rebuking her for any slips in grammar, any inelegantly formed turns of phrase. In turn, “she pulled out all the most insightful, the cleverest, the most beguiling, the most artful things her mind contained,” trying to speak with the confidence of the class whose space she had suddenly breached.
The image of that home, in the exclusive enclave of Caudéran, has stayed with Maître Susane all her life. The visit “put a spell” on her, one that took the magic out of everything else. She had always considered her parents’ modest home “enchanted.” But now, at just ten, she knew that “other houses were enchanted abodes, and enchanted far more intensely.” Even when the novel hints that Gilles might have abused her, she tells herself that she must be grateful to him for teaching her to want more. She even insists that the encounter inspired her to become an attorney. “He made me understand the pleasures I enjoyed and the talent I probably had for arguing and expounding,” she thinks, recalling “the boy who’d initiated her, illuminated her!” NDiaye’s delicately placed exclamation point suggests that Maître Susane is shouting at herself, trying to drown out the truth.
Suspense supplies the forward motion of “Vengeance Is Mine.” We are on edge when Maître Susane turns the corners of streets and the corners of her own mind, scared of what she might remember about Gilles, or the boy who might have been Gilles. After she agrees to take Marlyne Principaux’s case, the gaps in her own story start to fill in. She sees that she and her client have led parallel lives. Both are the daughters of working-class strivers who pushed their children to want to be in better rooms than the ones they were born into, leaving them to deal with the consequences of whatever happened inside. In this elegantly layered tale of social stratification, NDiaye takes us through a maze of alleyways, backstreets, and elegant foyers, until we are dizzy from trying to chart the course of upward mobility and eager for a place to rest—a way out rather than in.
NDiaye was born in 1967, the daughter of a Senegalese father and French mother. The latter raised her alone in a housing development in a suburb south of Paris. NDiaye was a prodigy who published her first novel at seventeen, and later won France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, in 2009, for “Three Strong Women,” a novel of interlocking tales set between France and Senegal. Success has not made NDiaye unfeeling toward the insidious injuries of class aspiration. If anything, across her work, she examines the wounds it leaves behind. “Vengeance Is Mine” shares some architectural features with NDiaye’s previous novel, “The Cheffe,” in which a young girl from a poor family of farmworkers is sent to work in the home of greedy, well-off gourmands, where she becomes a cook. Like Maître Susane, she is referred to only by her job title, a sign that she has allowed herself to be defined by, or, rather, reduced to, her prestigious line of work. The Cheffe’s education in cuisine is also an education in the insatiable appetites of the rich, and in the soul-hollowing experience of feeding them.
Maître Susane hires her own cook, Sharon, a Mauritian woman who also cleans her house, but her foothold in the middle class is precarious. (She only hires Sharon, who is undocumented, “as an act of militancy.”) At forty-two, she is still, by her own assessment, a “novice” in the law. She’s had only a handful of clients, including Sharon, whose immigration case she has taken pro bono, and someone who wants his name changed, believing it to be that “of a slave trader.” Though her apartment, in central Bordeaux, is “grand in its appointments” with “herringbone parquet floors, seventeenth-century fireplace, tall windows with little panes,” it is barely large enough for one person. To her parents’ shame, she drives an old low-cost car. Her mother, “her naïve, madly loving mother,” lives in fear that Maître Susane might fall back to what she “most dreaded and so heavy-handedly endeavored to protect her [daughter] from: the abandonment of lofty aspirations, the retreat to a mediocre way of life.” The case will bring in much needed work, but she struggles to imagine what Gilles hopes to achieve. As he leaves her office after his initial visit, he asks her, “You’ll get us out of this nightmare, won’t you?” What would it mean to win a case when the accused has committed infanticide against their own child? “The dead were not going to extract themselves from his bad dream and be born a second time,” she thinks.
The Medea theme has been on NDiaye’s mind. She co-wrote the screenplay for “Saint Omer,” directed and co-written by Alice Diop. The 2022 film was based on the true story of Fabienne Kabou, a French Senegalese woman who was convicted of the murder of her daughter, after the baby was found drowned on a northern French beach in 2013. In the film, the mother’s name is Laurence Coly, and she has left Senegal to pursue a philosophy degree at the Sorbonne. “I wanted to leave my mark,” she tells the judge, and, indeed, the highly publicized trial allows her to achieve the kind of notoriety she craved before her ambitions were thwarted by the racist barriers laid down by French society. Asked to explain why she killed her infant daughter, she can only tell the judge, “I hope this trial will give me the answer.”
As in “Saint Omer,” NDiaye is interested in the elusiveness of motive in crimes committed by mothers, who, she suggests, are at the mercy of an insanity-inducing chorus of voices from all corners of society telling them what to do and how to behave. When Maître Susane meets Marlyne for the first time, in the visitor’s room at the prison, Marlyne talks into the recorder for several pages uninterrupted, speaking of her deceased children in an almost incomprehensible stream of consciousness:
She is lucid only when she begs that Gilles not be allowed to visit her. The reason for her actions remains a mystery, likely even to herself—a disorienting mix of isolation and perfectionism inside a mind shattered by expectations and the failure to meet them. Like Laurence Coly, Marlyne Principaux was a woman of great promise. On the day she murders her children, police officers find her “wearing a voluminous T-shirt with the insignia of the Sorbonne.”
Reality is a slippery thing in NDiaye’s novels. In the tradition of French Surrealism, she aims to get at the truth by distancing herself from it. In “Vengeance Is Mine,” Maître Susane’s psyche breaks down as she works on Marlyne’s case, resulting in a narrative fractured by the trauma of its protagonist. She invents details and fills in the case file with her own projections. She expresses admiration for Marlyne’s mother (who reminds her of her own) for pushing her daughters to succeed in school, but that is a detail that Susane, not the family, has provided. She imagines that Gilles chose a poor girl to marry in order to manipulate her. Marlyne, she supposes, “complied with all the spoken or unspoken injunctions of that Principaux man who’d been clever enough, on that score at least (the sisters and mother told themselves, according to Me Susane), to marry a social inferior.” There is no evidence of such scheming on Gilles’s part, certainly none that will stand up in court.
But Maître Susane’s proximity to Marlyne helps her approach a solution to her own mystery: of what happened in that bedroom and why she cannot put it to rest. After some time on the case, she works up the courage to ask Gilles if the two have met before. He deflects, and accuses Maître Susane of acting strange. She replies, “I turned strange when I was ten years old.” Sometimes, NDiaye reminds us, the hardest person to extract a confession from is the victim.
In a 2021 interview with The White Review, NDiaye said she never wants her books to be “described with words ending in ‘-ist’, whether that be humanist, feminist, socialist,” adding, “I can be all of those things as a citizen, but not as an artist.” NDiaye treats politics and the material conditions it creates as forces that create unpredictable, idiosyncratic outcomes. She never lets her characters be flattened to make a point. A lesser author might stage the interplay between Marlyne and Maître Susane as the contest between a mother and a professional, the novel becoming a stage for the drama of women’s choices to play out. NDiaye transforms them instead into versions of a single person—two women raised to court the rich, to do whatever it took to be let into their houses, even if it meant they would never be at home in their own skin.
Maître Susane’s revenge against Gilles, and everyone like him, will be to give Marlyne a defense that indicts the ruling class and its tools of exclusion. The setting will be where it all began, the home of Gilles Principaux—but, this time, Maître Susane does not ask to be let in. The novel ends with what appears to be her opening statement at trial. In her remarks, she takes the jury into the rooms of the house where Marlyne was made a recluse. “The house confesses, the house that collaborates in the crime, it confesses, it says: I was that man’s accomplice,” she declares, breaking the front door down. ♦