There’s a dinner scene in Yannick Haenel’s delightfully chaotic novel Hold Fast Your Crown, comprising the entire second part of the book, that takes place at Brasserie Bofinger, considered one of the most beautiful restaurants in Paris. In this scene, we have drinking, a fracas, a near death experience, and a comparison between Nazi Europe and American massacres of indigenous Indians, among many other things. It’s literary bedlam at its finest.
This novel, like the dinner scene, revolves around Jean, a 50-year old French author struggling to recapture the success of his youth. He’s about to lose his apartment, he has 20 Euros to his name, and instead of returning to his once profitable writerly formulas, he has created a 700-page screenplay about “the mystical honeycombed interior” of Herman Melville’s mind. And the only person who can land this whale of a project is Michael Cimino, the American director of the Oscar-winning classic The Deer Hunter and the epic box office bomb Heaven’s Gate, who appears here as “a character from Proust decked out like a gaucho,” and who is looking for a screenplay “that attracts God in its pages.” Jean believes that he might have something to fit that bill. With a little help from a film industry friend, Jean hunts down Cimino, who (unsurprisingly enough) agrees to join him on this voyage in much the same way that J.D. Salinger joins Ray Kinsella’s cross-country quest in W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe. Together, they will hunt Melville’s mind as Ahab hunted his white whale.
If Jean and Cimino are the stars, the supporting actors include Pointel, the film producer friend who gives him Cimino’s phone number, and who survives a horrific car accident in Łódź after his vehicle collides with a stag; the neighbor Tot and his Dalmatian, Sabbat, whom Jean takes care of while Tot is travelling the world on poker tours, and who might just be a sacred animal, one that “never really belongs to its master, but always to the goddess of hunting”; two suspicious characters with black mustaches who are looking for Tot; Mme. Figo, the rather unpleasant concierge of Jean’s building who collects his mail in her “loge”; the maître d’ of Bofinger’s who looks an awful lot like Emmanuel Macron; and Isabelle Huppert, the actress who made her American film debut in Heaven’s Gate, and her friend, Léna, whose stories further inflame Jean’s passionate insanity and who may well have a honeycombed head of her own. A motley crew aboard this hunting vessel, to be sure.
Haenel isn’t moored to any plot line in the traditional sense of the word; rather, his novel consists of Jean’s various adventures, the people he encounters, the conversations they have, the philosophies they profess, and the stories they tell. If you’re looking for narrative momentum, you won’t find it here, but if you share Haenel’s sense of humor — which shines through bright and clear in Teresa Lavender Fagan’s luminous translation, humor being one of the most difficult things in literature to translate with any kind of success — everything flows quite freely. Reading this novel must be what it’s like to read a Wes Anderson script: equal parts wit and ridiculousness. Any writer — whether for the page or for the screen — who can successfully execute a smash cut from Moby-Dick to The Deer Hunter has skill and a sense of imagination to be reckoned with.
Some of the better scenes include a night of debauchery that leads Jean to compare Apocalypse Now! with ISIS beheading videos. When he wakes up the next day at noon, his first thought is to watch Coppola’s film again. Where lies the narrator’s true obsession here, with the whale or with the hunters? (It is worth noting that Haenel has written for Charlie Hebdo since the resumption of publication after the January 2015 terrorist attacks.) While at times acute and incisive, descriptions of the movies woven into the text can be tedious if you’ve seen them before, and even more so if you’re a film buff on a par with Jean himself.
There is also attention given to America’s history as a nation of immigrants — a history that resonates with particular acuity today. We are told at one point that a significant part of Jean’s 700-page screenplay takes place on Ellis Island and in lower Manhattan, where Melville himself was born. I half expected to turn the page and find Jean drinking vodka while watching Scorsese Gangs of New York, but for better or worse, that wasn’t one of the films Haenel interpolated into his work.
Just as a successful movie is memorable for its dialogue, Haenel’s best snippets of conversation take place at the Brasserie Bofinger, where Jean and Isabelle debate questions of pessimism against hope, of cooling ashes as opposed to the living flames of fire. Cimino, according to Jean, “was above all someone who had understood that the fire had disappeared … that the fire that animated people no longer existed.” Isabelle doesn’t agree: “But there are incredible people, unique individuals who exist, and they are not necessarily the most spectacular. Some of them are discreet, they don’t express themselves much, and sometimes they are even imperceptible. With them, believe me, your fire, even if it is invisible, will never go out.”
The title is a reference to the Book of Revelation: “Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation … Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown.” If readers have exhibited similar patience, they will ultimately learn that Jean has, in fact, willingly given it up. After accompanying Léna to her sister’s funeral, and at the suggestion of his friend Pointel, he lets go of his obsession with Melville and with the screenplay that once “obliterated everything in its path.” Instead, he will write a book. It will be about Michael Cimino, and it will (of course) become what you, dear readers, are holding in your hands. “In meeting him,” Jean says, “I had also encountered a thousand other things that had started to burn in my life. I had to tell about that, that flaming.” It would appear Isabelle has won their debate at Bofinger’s.
While following Jean and his madcap mind throughout this work, I found myself wishing I had a PDF of the novel so I could more easily search for and keep track of the many recurring symbols, among them light — the setting is Paris, after all, and Haenel proves to be an excellent gaffer — and white deer, which serves the author here as the White Rabbit served Lewis Carroll and the White Whale served Melville. The novel is “about” many abstruse things — madness, art, alcohol, and creativity not the least among them — but it’s the delivery, the voyage, that counts here. As D.H. Lawrence once said of Melville’s whale, “Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it.”
[Published by Other Press on April 2, 2019, 336 pages, $17.99 paperback]