A big fan of risk-taking and oblique destinies, Maria Pourchet comes over as a scorched earth novelist. She likes nothing better than to watch her characters burn everything down to start afresh.
Victoria, Marguerite, Marie, Reine, Laure, Aurore, Chloé: Maria Pourchet is all these women battling to carve out a niche for themselves, to live in a society that alienates them and assigns them ordinary positions, which they reject. We should also list the names of the male characters: Fabien, Clément, Alexis and others who, in their dogged determination to try and fail, then fail better, are remarkable for their air of enormous suffering, which the novelist explores through their inadequacies and limitations.
Maria Pourchet says it in Toutes les femmes sauf une: we write to silence the alienating voices, to exorcize the vicious voices whose aim – often unconscious – is to manipulate and humiliate. How do we emerge stronger from dealing with incommunicability, pettiness and emotional paralysis? Through speech and writing, the only viable spaces where the freedom to be yourself wears a thousand masks, all of them sincere. Where you have complete and uncompromising freedom to say what has remained unsaid for so long. Where, finally, a subject’s seriousness can coexist perfectly with the playful elements afforded by any fictional narrative, without fear of ridicule.

Maria Pourchet’s heroines simultaneously have huge respect for Parisianism and are, by the same token, its most pathetic propitiatory victims. Paris is both an ideal and a psychosis. In Avancer, Victoria, “born Marie-Laure, Vosges, Épinal prefecture, twenty-eight years old, is currently seeking the path of excellence in Paris” (p. 13), unsuccessfully, of course. In Rome en un jour, Marguerite had “enough responsibility to be able to buy herself suits on the Rue de Seine” (p. 82). In Feu, the challenge for Laure and Clément is to sidestep the stumbling blocks of desire in the plush bedroom of a hotel along the Quai Bourbon, on the stately Île de la Cité. Paris, city of all fantasies, of all types of domination and all thwarted dreams of grandeur. Anything goes there, because “no one is shackled to anyone” (Les impatients, p. 67) – or so it seems.
Chloé, the young actress in Western, psychologically abused by Alexis Zagner, will learn this to her cost. In Paris, one can appear and disappear at leisure but, as Maria Pourchet reminds us, always under the watchful eye of the journalists – those heroes of our times. Because Alexis, although he disappears after causing Chloé irreparable physical and mental harm, finds himself and his cruelty the subject of various online exposés that denounce coercive control, transforming what once went on behind closed doors into a matter of public interest. Maria Pourchet does not merely describe a city and its lifestyle, a period and its excesses. She turns her piercing gaze on the deviant extremist attitudes of the professors of desire and the abandonments of the deserters of passion.

An attempt to sum up the work of Maria Pourchet is hard, if not impossible. For a start, it is to be hoped that this body of work is only just beginning. But, in the interests of brevity, it might be said that the writer seems to have adopted the plan of writing brilliantly about fiascos.
Fiasco, from the Italian word for “failure”, was brought into the French language by Stendhal. Writing about a fiasco is not exactly the same as writing about a failure. It is to write about an absolute, definitive and complete failure. The type that jeopardises what comes next, replaces it. The Stendhalian fiasco is found in Le Rouge et le Noir, when Julien Sorel is sentenced to death for aspiring to success and love. The beheading of Julien, an impassioned man, results in a funeral procession and a sudden cessation of all narrative commentary. It is also found in Lucien Lewen, when our hero tumbles ineptly from horseback just as he is intending to demonstrate his skill to a woman who has caught his eye, giving rise to an entire squadron’s cruel laughter. Like Stendhalian anti-heroes, Maria Pourchet’s characters fall, examine the precipice, either to die a premediated death (Clément in Feu), or to stand on the very brink (Victoria in Avancer). Out of curiosity and stubbornness. Or defiance. Let us hold onto that last highly romantic assumption. Sometimes, when the fall is not fatal, a fiasco can inflict a radically different outcome.
Getting to the heart of the fiasco is a romantic idea: this is what sets the pace of Maria Pourchet’s novels, particularly Feu, a novel about crippled passion and desire, a failed future. Laure and Clément love each other, at one remove from the world, which they will eventually leave, in one way or another. Their obsessions govern the temporal framework of the narrative, which is disrupted by their fantasies, impeded by their blunders, breathless at the thought of approaching the unknown, and finally halted by the fury of their passion.

Cusk continued this interrogation of the matter of her own life in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published in 2012. Aside from the personal toll taken by the events of her life, the response to the book was in many quarters brutal, and Cusk has been frank about the cost she had to bear. “Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath,” she has said. “That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist.” So we must ask: what does it take for a woman to be honest about the circumstances of her own life? Cusk’s work accosts the patriarchal structures, often invisible and co-opted by men and women both, which so many live inside while hardly being aware that they do. “Freedom, when it comes, is nothing if it leaves people un-free behind you,” she told the Paris Review: the integrity of her writing opens up a road for others to follow.