The Stepson

by Emmanuel Bove

The Stepson is the tale of a young man's infatuation with his stepmother, a well-placed bourgeoise with painterly ambitions; of that young man's replication of his father's life (low-class affair, illegitimate son, marriage); and of his own successive marriages and affairs, none of which work. At a much deeper level, it is a study of what Russians call oblomovschina, the paralysis of the will. The Stepson is a nullity with ambitions as long as he needn't do anything to advance them. He doesn't act, he undergoes. It is the intricate, torturously rationalized play of his passivity before fate that makes this one of Bove's most fascinating novels, a sort of tragic bedroom farce.

330 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

Emmanuel Bove, born in Paris as Emmanuel Bobovnikoff in 1898, died in his native city on Friday 13 July 1945, the night on which all of France prepared for the large-scale celebration of the first 'quatorze juillet' since World War II. He would probably have taken no part in the festivities. Bove was known as a man of few words, a shy and discreet observer. His novels and novellas were populated by awkward figures, 'losers' who were always penniless. In their banal environments, they were resigned to their hopeless fate. Bove's airy style and the humorous observations made sure that his distressing tales were modernist besides being depressing: not the style, but the themes matched the post-war atmosphere precisely.

Reviews

[Daniel Grenier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ça faisait longtemps que je n’avais pas lu un livre aussi fastidieux et passionnant en même temps. Bove s’essaie ici semble-t-il à une sorte d’inversion avant la lettre du précepte du show don’t tell: pourquoi ne pas tout dire, tout révéler des motivations secrètes? C’est lourd au début, cette surenchère d’explication psychologique des intentions des personnages, mais ça devient vite fascinant. L’effet finit par avoir du sens, ne serait-ce que dans l’accumulation de détails et dans le style ampoulé qui en découle. C’est de loin le roman le plus chargé que j’ai lu de lui. À la fin, on ne peut que se dire Ah! Pauvre, pauvre Jean-Noël!

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jean-Noel, the novel's "protagonist," is a man who does not want to be pinned down, committed, or involved in confrontation in any real way - he'll say whatever lie will get him out of the present situation. Meanwhile he hopes circumstances will simply resolve without his intervention. It's hard not to feel personally attacked when reading Bove.

What is interesting is that, usually, novels that proceed via a method of "and...and...and", a type of concatenation that just narrates from chapter to chapter another vignette until the novel reaches what feels like a natural enough conclusion, are complete bores to me. I tend to put down novels where I don't feel the weight of destiny in a page, when I don't feel like it's a brick in the novel's grand effect at the end and where I feel as though things are just happening in a slow drip to buy the author time and pages. Not that that couldn't be great, but, rather than conveying the contingency of life authors of that type of novel generally just demonstrate that they are the slaves of contingency - I can't feel their force over the events on the page, that these seemingly random events will ultimately congeal into a resonant ending. This is different. While it never feels as though there are radical breaks and that one embarrassing event just bleeds into another, it feels like a crescendo in the post-rock sense, like listening to a Godspeed! record where all the notes build such that the silence at the end weighs heavier.

Envy is rampant and controls each character and this, to me, is an important factor in a novel "working" for me. You can't help but feel Jean-Noel's being trapped by the societal gaze and wince at his duplicitous efforts to get free (while this is completely a hell of his own making). But this isn't freedom in the big "F" sense, it is our own freedom, an empty freedom to do nothing and be nothing. And we're surprised when we look back and find out we are nothing and that so much empty time without historical value has passed. This book makes you feel the grand deferral of life and freedom, a deferral always in the name of some lame ideal, that Bove was able to mine to greater effect than any other author (think of Quicksand and the protagonist's indecision and vacillation leading him to remain trapped in Vichy France as an ironically natural Petainist, not quite able to muster the commitment to become a partisan).

On top of this, there are so many striking observations and delicate details of feeling and internal revelation so quietly narrated that the book never fails to please at a sentence level. The frank depiction of each character's ambivalence is sometimes brutal and makes for great conclusions to chapters.

While "A Singular Man" is just for completists, this is a must for Bove's fans. One of his best third person novels. It may well be his most autobiographical and, with the juxtaposition of Jean-Noel and Annie, his stepmother, it feels as if he is exploring contradictions within himself as an artist and a man.