All the Way

In the small French village of Clèves – a sleepy place, where the main attractions are a seedy nightclub and a yearly carnival, and where ‘the whole school is obsessed by sex’ – teenage Solange is navigating the anxieties of her ever-growing sexual desire.

All the Way is the latest work from award-winning French author Marie Darrieussecq, best known for her 1996 debut Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation, a beguiling story of a young woman who is slowly transformed into pig. Here, she continues her exploration of the female body in a darkly humorous coming of age story that is both familiar and surprising.  Naïve and awkward, Solange is coming into an awareness of her body and discovering the pleasures and pains it is capable of. She is desperate to be touched, to experience, to have the reassurance that comes with being desired. But as much as she is obsessed with the idea of having sex, she is consumed by a feeling that she’s not pretty, not sophisticated, not quite the same as all the other girls.

The next problem for Solange is how she should be sexual – whether ‘in a superior, stylish way like Lætitia’ or ‘cool and liberated like Nathalie’, though she fears her style is ‘a grubby, I-can’t-help-myself way.’ The anxieties surrounding female sexuality are vividly captured in the way Solange and her friends try on different roles. They feign sophistication, pepper their speech with phrases and mannerisms they’ve picked up from parents and older cousins, and impart wisdom about sex, love and life in knowing, jaded tones. Conversations are rendered with an authenticity that humorously reveals the performative nature of so much of adolescent social experience – the charades we have all played to impress, to save face, to fit in.

Darrieussecq relates these moments with a lightness of touch that perfectly captures youthful glibness, but there is a real darkness simmering beneath the pages.

Solange’s desperation for sexual contact leads her to become infatuated with boys who treat her terribly. Her first sexual experiences are – from the reader’s vantage point – quite exploitative, but she comes away giddy and thinking, ‘maybe she is falling in love’. Some scenes are almost painful to read. The disrespectful, condescending way that Arnaud, an older boy who she convinces herself is sort of her boyfriend, treats her is infuriating, but more unsettling is the sadness and loneliness within Solange that leads her to accept it. And then there is the disturbingly sexually charged relationship with Monsieur Bihotz, the neighbour who has been babysitting Solange her whole life and whose house she still stays at most nights. All throughout the novel, there is a pervasive sense that it’s only a matter of time before things go too far and become very, very messy indeed.

Though much of the narrative feels familiar and almost predictable on the surface, Darrieussecq treats it with a rare perceptiveness and authenticity, providing an intimate insight into the obsessions and tensions of adolescence.

Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5

By Marie Darrieussecq

Paperback, 224pp, $29.99

ISBN: 9781921922732

Text Publishing