Daniel Handler, in his jacket leaf blurb for Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, writes, “I woke up the other morning and started to read this marvelous book. I stayed in bed until I read the last page. I could not for the life of me think of anything in the world I wanted to do more but read this book.”
In response: I woke up the other afternoon and started to read this marvelous book. I stayed in bed until I read the last page. I could not for the life of me think of anything in the world I wanted to do more but read this book.
It was perhaps fitting that it was an afternoon nap from which I had awoken when I cracked the spine (literally: every time I turned a page, the binding would creak its assent) of this short, wonderful book, as Bouillier is indulging in the same Sunday past time when a ringing telephone wakes him from his slumber and completely upends his existence. On the phone is an ex-girlfriend from years past — a woman who had left Bouillier, after four years together, without a word, then or since — who has called to invite him to a birthday party for French artist Sophie Calle. Calle always requests the presence of a “mystery guest” at her parties, a stranger who represents the exciting and unknowable year about to begin, and Bouillier is to be it.
To anyone who has had their heart broken, Bouillier’s neurotic reaction to his ex-girlfriend’s call will seem scarily familiar, as it all too accurately documents the cruel ministrations of a damaged and irrational consciousness. One will recall the immediate aftermath of a break-up, when any contact from the other-who-shall-not-be-named would “plunge me back into a hellish slough that I’d considered well behind me, and that all of a sudden wasn’t, and I fell back into sickening black thoughts I thought I’d exorcised…”
Bouillier’s extreme reactions belie his greatest achievement: he shows us the amazing stories the average person is able to create, and does create every day. In response to tragedy or trauma, the unfettered imagination will spiral with fabricated connections, impossible coincidences, and over-investitures of meaning, and will vacillate from complete abjection to euphoric revelation and back again in a heartbeat span, leaving its owner exhausted and defeated. Take Bouillier’s flights of fancy after the call as a darkly funny, ultimately cautionary tale: “I wanted to understand, and while I stood there clinging absurdly, instinctively to this desire — to understand — as my sole support and the last vestige of my humanity, it hit me. She’d called late on a Sunday afternoon, and she’d left me in the middle of the afternoon, also on a Sunday. Coincidence? Hardly.” Of course, that is all it is, a coincidence and nothing more. Bouillier believes Michel Leiris’ death, and Sophie Calle’s need for a “mystery guest,” have conspired in some cosmic fashion to necessitate his former other’s call. But these coincidences, without Bouillier’s energetic imagination, are empty vessels without meaning. We force logic on arbitrariness, and create stories from found material.In some sense, all stories are about stories in general.
By simply existing, a story is a testament to the human capacity for (or compulsion to) narrative. Bouillier’s magnificent self-delusions become mini-narratives themselves, and at least in the confines of this book, jostle for space with the real and actual events. And this is an integral part of human life: in lieu of facts about our ex-lovers, we fill that absence with fictions that either serve to hurt us more or save our lives (depending on our mood at the time); in lieu of the person, we have pictures and vestigial habits, smells and tastes and touches.
The Mystery Guest shows us how stories are the stuff of human existence, and the climax of the book is Bouillier’s realization of how pervasive fictions are; of how we not only create stories to live, but how we sometimes live the fictions of others. (I won’t ruin this epiphany here, but the literary men and women who read The Mystery Guest will find this section of the book oddly compelling and romantic, as I think Bouillier does.)
Rarely do I have a physical reaction to the things I read: I will laugh out loud at Wodehouse or David Sedaris, but I have never felt the urge to cry; that is, until I read this book. It is affecting because Bouillier’s voice is affected: it is honest; by turns miserable and exultant. When he tries to play it cool, he lets you know it’s a front; when he uses a cliche, he tells you he’s using it on purpose. And when he escapes from the depths of despair at the book’s close, when he rises from the ashes so to speak, you feel as if you’ve been through the fire with him.
After reading John Updike’s rules for book reviewing, I feel obligated to quote one long passage here so you, dear Reader, can decide what you think of the book for yourself. This passage is from when Bouillier first arrives at the party, and his former lover notices him and approaches. If anything, it is an almost perfect evocation of the jilted lover’s feelings toward his lost other, an other whose greatest cruelty is indifference:
“The mere act of keeping myself in one piece seemed like a kind of magic trick, and I felt a trap door give way beneath my feet when she came up and leaned in to kiss my cheek as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But this really was the final straw. How dare she? It wasn’t just inappropriate, it was obscene, it was phony through and through, as if our story could ever, even conceivably, degenerate into — into what? Friendship? Camaraderie? Whatever she had in mind was out of the question! She could save these affections, these empty shams of hers for other men, or else love meant nothing and our story had never happened and she herself didn’t exist, and just then I could have torn her face off, I could have ripped it from her neck and stamped on it before she uttered a word.”
