Joël Dicker cannot walk around in downtown Geneva. He gets mobbed. Pedestrians grab his shoulders; they demand answers, his signature. The situation is unusual for two reasons. One, the Swiss, Calvinist to the core, are known for their discretion. And two, Dicker is a novelist, one most Americans have never even heard of.
At twenty-eight, Dicker has been a celebrity for two years now—first as a name-to-know within the insular world of European book publishing, and then to readers across the continent, who, tired of Nordic noir, were excited to read a seven-hundred-page thriller that was neither set in a subarctic city nor written by a Scandinavian.
Dicker’s début novel, “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair,” was first noticed in a substantial way in October, 2012, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, when his (very small) French publisher unexpectedly sold the rights to thirty-five countries. The book is being translated into thirty-seven languages. It won the 2012 Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie, and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt the same year. The two literary awards, among the most esteemed in France, are usually given to serious novels, not murder mysteries. Dicker’s book sold over two million copies overseas, and last summer it surpassed Dan Brown’s “Inferno” on the European best-seller lists. In May, it was finally published in America by Penguin Books, which printed a hundred and twenty-five thousand copies. It was the largest deal in the imprint’s history.
Marcus Goldman, the novel’s protagonist, is, like Dicker, young and rich and famous. When the story opens, he’s trying—and failing—to write a second book. His first, like “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair,” was a massive success, and brought with it the spoils of literary fame: serious-sounding praise, top-shelf liquor, actresses. But now, on deadline and unable to compose even a single decent sentence, Marcus’s publisher is threatening litigation. And so he escapes New York City and heads to a rural beach town in New Hampshire, where his college writing professor, the celebrated novelist Harry Quebert, lives in Salingeresque seclusion.
Not long after Marcus arrives, the body of Nola, a fifteen-year-old girl who had disappeared thirty-three years earlier, is found buried—along with a manuscript of Quebert’s canonized book—in the elder author’s yard. Soon the world learns that Quebert and Nola were having a secret love affair, and, though everyone else now suspects foul play, Marcus becomes intent on solving the case and clearing his mentor’s name.
The small town provides a confined space in which the procedural plays out, with every ambient character becoming a suspect for at least a few pages. The plot is riddled with red herrings and peopled with archetypes—the gossipy neighbor, the isolated millionaire, the shunned cripple with a tragic backstory. As Marcus attempts to learn the truth, he’s offered a multimillion-dollar advance for a real-time account of his mission.
The book itself seems almost cynically designed to be popular in the United States. It’s familiar (set in New England) but fancy (by a francophone); it’s fun (a page-turner), but sophisticated-seeming (about writers). It’s easy to see why people in the publishing world would be attracted to it.
But the book’s air of erudition (metanarratives, bookish set pieces) is more convincing in summary than on the page. The dialogue barely surpasses lorem ipsum in its specificity: “Do you have any change?” “No.” “Keep it, then.” “Thank you, writer.” “I’m not a writer anymore.” And life advice from an alleged literary genius takes the form of shampoo-bottle nonsense: “Rain never hurt anyone. If you’re not brave enough to run in the rain, you’ll certainly never be brave enough to write a book.” The fact that there’s a novel within a novel about the author of another novel isn’t handled with any sort of postmodern panache, and neither are the literary allusions to Roth and Mailer—a food-obsessed Jewish mother, boxing matches—which might actually just be clichéd writing. It lacks the psychological precision of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” and the sentence-level skill of Donna Tartt’s novels (both of which come to mind as similarly ambitious, plot-thick works). It’s hard to tell whether the novel is as wooden in the original French, but I’m told that it is.
That said, I read the thing—which is heftier than a suburban county phone book—in two days. Not that I could answer many questions about its mechanics now, or even just hours after putting it down. It’s the sort of novel you recommend to a grieving friend or coworker out on jury duty—somebody with temporarily disabled critical faculties trying to forget who or where they are. The book’s American setting is surely responsible, in large part, for its appeal in Europe, as is its patina of sophistication—it’s a thriller for people who don’t think of themselves as people who read thrillers.
“I found in the American literature something much more appealing than in French literature, especially after the Second World War,” Dicker told me in his halting, accidentally antiquated English. This was earlier in the spring, and he was in New York City as part of an East Coast pre-publicity tour. We had breakfast together, and he carried himself like a leading man—somebody too handsome and successful not to be incredibly kind. “It was decided that it is not allowed anymore to tell a story in a book. In French literature now there are a lot, a lot of writers writing about themselves—their feelings, their life. In French, it’s called auto-fiction— ‘my life but it’s not my life.’ ”
This wasn’t a purely extemporaneous criticism. A few months prior, at a swanky luncheon thrown by Penguin, at Gramercy Tavern, Dicker spoke with the same disdain. "French literature is boring," he said, post-salad. "That's a fact." He described the typical work of French fiction as being "slim" and "auto-centric," at which point he picked up his butter knife and pretended to use it as a mirror. "They say nobody reads anymore,” he sighed. “Well, maybe it's the books' problem. Maybe authors have a responsibility to entertain."
When asked to go into more detail about what qualities, exactly, contemporary French novels share, he gleefully set a tedious scene: “People living in Paris, in the kitchen, eating eggs in the morning. It’s raining outside. They’re thinking what is going to happen … or not. It’s really empty.” He paused for a moment and then suggested an alternative plot: “The story of a guy who is having sex with two women, and … that’s it!”
Americans admire dignified French vérité. We love the New Wave auteurs and their inheritors for the languidly paced, loosely plotted small dramas they create—the very qualities Dicker is critical of in French literature. “A lot of people have said to me, ‘Yeah it’s a good book, but it’s a page-turner.’ ” Dicker said. “Well, yeah, so that means you want to turn the page. If you don’t want to turn the page then it’s not a good book. This idea that literature must be difficult…” He rolled his eyes. The French, Dicker seems to think, are too French for themselves; meanwhile, Americans can’t get enough of Frenchness. A French writer trying to be more American just doesn’t export well.
Based on current numbers acquired from Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry’s not-quite-reliable point-of-sale database, sales for “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair” in the U.S. (not including e-books) look to be around thirteen thousand—by no means meager, but also not mind-blowing, especially considering the enormous run. The reviews stateside have been so far sparse and not exactly positive. Newsday called the novel a “lumbering contrivance,” and the Washington Post characterized it as one of “earnest lardiness.” If Dicker is right, though—if French readers have been denied easy-to-swallow sentences and swiftly moving plot—then it makes sense that his novel did so well over there. But there’s no deficit of “readable” books written in English, and available in America. Literature isn’t immune to the rules of capitalism. This might just be a matter of supply and demand.
Alice Gregory is a writer living in New York.
Photograph: Denis Allard/REA/Redux.
