PORTHOLE

At an unusual sanatorium, a troubled film director reflects on the derailment of her career.

An accident on the set of a movie called Sanguine Season, filming in South America, has taken the life of auteur Helena Désir’s leading man, Corey, and the studio has sent her to Jaquith House to pull herself together—that much is clear. Much is not in this dreamlike novel so drenched in the spirit of French New Wave film that it’s a bit of shock to realize that it’s apparently set in the present day, for example when it’s mentioned that phones are not allowed at the asylum, or when Corey’s manner of speaking is characterized as a “pastiche of Euro-Zen sport-drink affirmations.” Jaquith House is a “very special collective,” according to its director, Dr. Duvaux, who explains, “Helena, I think you will find that even our sufferers are apt in their sensitivities, and that our aides-de-camp are investigating their own psychic crenellations via their practice.” In other words, the inmates are running the asylum. Chapters alternate between Helena’s bizarre encounters with the other residents (one of them seemingly enters her room through a tapestry on the wall) and her recollections of her career and her three leading men. As she tells Duvaux, “I don’t have lovers, Doctor. I have actors with benefits. I am not in a nineteenth-century novel.” No, she definitely is not. She is in a surreal, archly philosophical, often cryptic, definitely sardonic novel about…the costs of making art? the abuses of power in that process? If you love Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, if you can’t get enough of Last Year at Marienbad (which gets a shoutout early on)—this book may be for you.

An unsympathetic main character and static plot make this heady confection a challenging read.