Interior

This autofiction novel from Clerc (The Man Who Killed Roland Barthes) is a tour of the author’s Paris apartment. Composed of small vignettes listing in detail every item within each room, it’s an experiment in narrative form and narcissism that, though clever, overstays its welcome. Beginning with the abode’s entryway and concluding in the bedroom, the author sifts through file cabinets, office drawers, and shelves to examine gadgets, books, and ephemera accumulated during his decade-long residency. Clerc—or his fictional counterpart—laments the tossing of a worn sponge and offers his thoughts on new wave music while periodically being interrupted by a ringing doorbell that reveals an empty front doorway. Along the way, traits emerge, from the author’s germophobia to his sexual proclivities, but moments of self-reflection and diversion—at one point, the author spots meat hanging on a plastic hanger in his neighbor’s window—rarely last more than a paragraph and are eschewed in favor of over-intellectualized tangents. Too often, pages of navel-gazing muddy scenes of genuine interest. The author claims to be the first to commit such an exhaustive walkthrough to paper, yet he never stops to consider whether his task is worth its labor, beyond complaining about the three years it takes to complete. [em](July) [/em]