Review: Zenith Hotel - Oscar Coop-Phane (translated by Ros Schwartz)

‘Life is painful and disappointing’; the opening words of Michel Houellebecq’s writing career summarise a gloomy, anti-existentialist worldview, which doesn’t so much rage against the drudgery of existence as wallow in it. To accept the facts of our lives, to be as comfortable as possible within the shades of the prison house, is as much as we can hope for; any attempt to break free will be brutally slapped down by the universe.

This is also the philosophy of Oscar Coop-Phane’s debut novella, Zenith Hotel. Written when the author was 20 (he’s 23 now), Zenith Hotel is narrated by a prostitute, referred to by her clients as ‘Nanou’. There is no glamorisation of sex work here; she insists that she is ‘a streetwalker. Not a call girl or anything like that, no, a common streetwalker with high heels and menthol cigarettes’. She has no expectation of a different life, no aspiration beyond survival. She is ‘a body that’s simply trying not to feel too much pain’.

An older woman might seem a strange choice of narrative voice for a young man writing his first book, but she is careful not to give too much of herself to the reader (‘I don’t want to analyse myself. I don’t give a stuff about my own case’). Instead, large chunks of Zenith Hotel are given over to descriptions of her clients, a resolutely proletarian and unglamorous mixture of prisoners, bartenders, school administrators and mechanics. It is never clear whether these characters’ backstories have been revealed to Nanou in conversation, or whether she is projecting her views on to them, but each ‘case study’ builds up a picture of an alienated, bored population.

The first client, Dominic, has an element of the gothic in his history. Unable to cope with the pressure of expectation in his bourgeois upbringing, he fantasised that his family would kill him by sneaking up while he was practicing music and crushing his head with the piano lid. Nanou is visiting him in prison, on his birthday – he feels safer here, comfortable within the walls he has built around himself. His cell-mate treats him kindly in return for occasional sexual favours, a task he doesn’t enjoy performing but which seems like a decent trade-off for a quiet life. The parallels with Nanou are clear.

All of her clients, in fact, have trouble with their relatives, though not to the same degree of violence. Wives and mothers are figures of resentment, loading them with expectations which they can’t fulfil. Nanou wants nothing from her clients, and they are more comfortable with her coldness than they are with the pressures of family life. While occasionally their anger builds to extreme levels (Victor imagines the world drowning in ‘chasms of puke’), the everyday ennui of Emanuel is more representative. As he says, ‘there are hundreds like us. We simply don’t see them. Actually, it’s a bit scary’.

There is no arc to Nanou’s story; Zenith Hotel is a snapshot of a typical day in a life dominated by routine, the feeling of waking up, going for coffee, working, and coming home to watch television in bed. There is no prospect of advancement for Nanou, no career development or promotion; in fact, her earning potential decreases as she ages. This is her life, and there is no escape. For the everyday underachievers she services, the story is much the same.

Zenith Hotel is an intriguing debut, by an ambitious writer; Coop-Phane has a clear philosophy, and isn’t reliant on set-pieces to move his narrative along. The structure is curious, with much of the text taken up with ‘case studies’, focusing on the backstories of Nanou’s clients instead of the details of her inner life, but this is broadly successful. The influence of Houellebecq is clear here (there is even a long passage in favour of dogs, a common feature of the older writer’s work), but Coop-Phane has his own voice – it would be hard to imagine Houellebecq choosing a female narrator, for example. This maybe isn’t a book to read on the Eurostar, but it offers an insight into a side of Paris seen less often on these shores, and into a particular view of the human condition in general. In Coop-Phane’s Paris, we are all in the gutter, looking down the drain.