George Perec is increasingly being recognised as an innovative and important writer in the UK, and this new edition of his debut novella is one of a series of re-releases this year. Perhaps best known for the flamboyantly stylish tour de force A Void, a murder mystery in which absence of the letter ‘e’ is a key plot point, Perec is a technically brilliant novelist capable of taking on a range of styles. By contrast to his better known works, Things is a more subtly experimental book which, in retrospect, seems extremely mature and prescient.
Like Huysmans, Perec was a career civil servant, who kept up his day job even as his literary work became celebrated. As an established author, he became part of the OuLiPo movement, but Things was written outside of their guidelines. It is still far from conventional, though. Things does not have a plot, in the traditional sense. Instead, Perec gives the reader a montage overview of the lives of two Parisian university drop-outs, defined by the interaction with commodities.
In the first section, we see two young people aspiring to a lifestyle beyond their means, suffering the anxiety of not being able to afford the items which will define their social status. They work casually in market research, and attempt to maintain the bohemian lifestyle of their student friends. Perec details their daily activities, their aspirations and interactions, without ever presenting the reader with dialogue; Things is a minute description of lives in which every facet of existence is defined by the relationship of the individual to commodities. This is DeBord’s spectacle in practice.
Although the characters are clearly alienated in their society, and the lack of dialogue alienates them from the reader, Perec’s narrative never lapses into hostility towards his creations. They are interchangeable, part of a mass of directionless young people in an atomised urban environment. Paris itself is presented as a series of arcades and shop fronts. Like the flaneurs described by Walter Benjamin, Jerome and Sylvie wander through the streets of this consumer paradise, lost in the crowd; but their focus is not on their fellow shoppers but the products themselves. Perec depicts the defeat of society by the city - lifestyle is prioritised above interaction, and communities are replaced by loose networks of acquaintances, essentially interchangeable.
In Part Two, Perec moves the characters to Tunisia. Having failed in their quest for material satisfaction, they attempt to find a more spiritual lifestyle away from the city. However, they lack the basic skills to adapt to life in a country which has not reached the stage of Western decadence. They fall back into dull routine; location is essentially unimportant, they cannot escape their sense of materialistic ennui.
Essentially, Things is an illustration of dislocation; Jerome and Sylvie do not fit anywhere, lacking the capital to thrive in bohemian Paris and unable to adapt to the more primitive rural lifestyle. They attempt cut loose from friends who follow a career path, before eventually bowing to the inevitable and taking respectable bourgeois roles in marketing firms. The theme of young people struggling to afford the material goods which they hope will define them, clinging to the lifestyle of their university days, and pursuing a peripatetic career, will be uncomfortably familiar to many, and indeed seems ahead of its time - Things is an excellent, cynical contrast to the freedom seekers portrayed by novelists such as Kerouac.
More than its message, though, Perec’s great achievement is to allow the reader such complete access to two characters’ mindsets without dialogue or interaction. Focussing on the things which they fetishise gives us greater insight in 120 pages than many writers achieve in a career. In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis used objects to signify the absence of personality; Perec uses them to pierce to the heart of his characters, implying sadness and longing. This may be an even greater achievement.
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