Dear Dickhead
Virginie Despentes, MacLehose Press, £14.99

VIRGINIE DESPENTES is a French author. A runaway, sex worker, punk rocker and iconoclast, her newest novel, titled Dear Dickhead, features a protagonist accused of sexual harassment and stalking his assistant.  

This protagonist, who is a popular crime novelist, is called out by his victim during the period of the so-called #Metoo movement. The victim conducts her campaign on a personal blog that functions as a journal wherein she describes her experiences, the mental health crisis the harassment caused and her desire to destroy the man who victimised her. 

The result, as it is played out in the novel’s pages, is vivid, sometimes humorous, painful and problematic. It is a battle of the sexes played by 2020 rules. The house formerly dominated by the male of the species doesn’t always have the odds in its favour.  

The dickhead in the title is the novelist Oscar B. The word itself refers to the greeting in an email he received from a famous but ageing French film actress. Her name is Rebecca. In a drunken and obnoxious public comment on Instagram, Oscar B remarks on Rebecca’s fading looks. Her response begins with the salutation, Dear Dickhead.  

What follows is a book-long series of exchanges between Oscar B and Rebecca. It is a conversation that ultimately includes Oscar B’s sister (who was childhood friends with Rebecca), his ex-wife, his daughter and the recipient of his incessant, aggressive and unwanted advances, Zoe Katana. Despite the difficulty of using email exchanges as the entire text when writing fiction, Despentes has managed to do so quite skilfully.

Behind it all and informing it all is the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying public health measures people around the world were convinced and coerced into adapting. While none of the characters seem to have much trouble finding places they can isolate themselves — after all, none of them is living on the street — the reality of the lockdown affects each in their own way.

No novel that features the pandemic and lockdown in its story has come close to describing the totality of that moment in time, but Dear Dickhead does a decent job of incorporating it into its tale.

This is not a pretty tale. Sexual harassment is an ugly and real byproduct of the patriarchy, intensified by the hierarchies of capital and corporatist bureaucracies. Mental health crises are another such phenomenon. The expectations of a culture that idolises good looks and devours youth are cruel to those who lose both after depending on them for as long as they can. There are hints of redemption that are then tempered by the reality of habit and reputation. 

Nonetheless, it is an excellent read.

The writing in Dear Dickhead is electric, explosive, mad, beautiful, and exhilarating. Nothing is sacred, life is rude and ugly and all is potentially beautiful. The world Despentes explored, ravaged and revealed in her non-fiction feminist text King Kong Theory is now a clever, witty and riotous novel. Its location in the time of the Covid pandemic merely heightens that characterisation and the contradictions of our contemporary spiral towards what looks more and more like a much greater madness.

Ron Jacobs latest book, Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.