Brian Dillon
C’est cool . . . Ann Scott’s novel set amid a ’90s Parisian milieu of techno beats, club drugs, and bisexual ravers.
Superstars, by Ann Scott, translated by Jonathan Woollen,
Astra House, 304 pages, $22
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The cultish French writer Ann Scott, whose second novel, Superstars, was first published in 2000 and appears now in English, translated by Jonathan Woollen, has lived and worked at the edges of fashion, music, and club culture since the late 1970s. As she told the Guardian in 2023, at the age of twelve she was sent to learn English on the Sussex coast, but soon absconded to London, where she discovered punk and heroin. In the 1980s, she was a musician and model; I’m quite sure I bought the July 1986 issue of the British style magazine i-D, with its cover photograph of Scott: slicked hair, heart-shaped eye patch, a prodigious number of tattoos for the time. Something of that era’s draconian attitude to subcultural semiotics, a sense that stylistic shifts were also moral events, lives on in Superstars, which is set a decade or so later. The novel is narrated by Louise, who at thirty-one has recently quit the etiolated company of minor rock stars for the baggier milieu of the Parisian techno scene. With that move, she also finds herself among a lesbian set of clubbers and DJs, and getting into relationships she imagines she is cool enough to control.
At the start, Louise is waiting to hear if she has secured a lucrative recording contract that will be her passport out of rock nostalgia, symbolized throughout by her opiated former boyfriend Nikki (who somewhat resembles the late English singer Nikki Sudden), and into the blissed future of bucket hats, basslines, and pills. In entertaining, but in the end limited, ways, Superstars is a novel of material attachments in a loose French lineage that includes Madame Bovary’s shopping sprees and the upwardly mobile couple in Georges Perec’s Les choses. Scott carefully inventories the accoutrements of cool. Nikki’s look is Nick Cave cut with prime Keith Richards, all black velvet Levi’s and three buttons open on the shirt that reveals his skinny white frame, even as he approaches forty. We get a whole page about his guitar collection: the right Gretsch White Falcon, Gibson Les Paul Junior, and cheapo Teisco to signal his glam-punk allegiances. The same rapt attention is paid to Louise’s shopping list of electronics: “as soon as I closed my eyes, I saw doors opening onto dusty back-rooms where deluxe TB303s and TR909s, old Prophet-5 synths and Minimoogs all lay dormant just for me . . .” On the wrong side of history, there are Nikki’s heroes: Syd Barrett, Johnny Thunders, Anita Pallenberg, and Marianne Faithfull. On the other: Louise and her DJ ex-girlfriend, Alex, plus techno legends, like Kevin Saunderson, who turn up in Paris.
A vexing task for the author of the novel of a music scene, or in this case two: how to write about art, influence, and audience without resorting to shorthand litanies of musicians, records, venues, instruments assaulted, and drugs ingested? At times, Superstars is a touch too telegraphic in its evocation of an era that after all was only just past its prime when the book first appeared in France. The effect is to make the novel seem already nostalgic for the period it’s looking over its Day-Glo shoulder to describe, or to reduce the anonymous rush of music and movement to a wide-eyed raver cartoon. It doesn’t help that the timelines are already askew: Scott is recalling a scene that’s maturing out of relevance, and contrasting it, in the ’90s, with—what? A lot of drop-dead but deadeyed rock cliché, as if that were the obvious alternative? More than once I had to ask: What planet were these (white) people living on in the hip-hop and R & B–saturated ’90s? Oh, Paris. But perhaps the sense of something already anachronistic in 2000 actually serves this novel well: the English translation arrives at a time when it’s harder than ever to pin the past down, to know if you’re looking at or hearing a sad throwback or savvy miner of past trends.
Or perhaps that was always the case: after all, here is a novel about a time when Nikki’s skeletal mien is about to triumph, fashion-wise: the Strokes and Hedi Slimane are round the corner. It will turn out to be quite easy to move from elegantly wasted rock style to vivid dance culture and back again. I have a feeling that many readers coming to this book for its indie-sleaze aspects will find themselves similarly a bit flummoxed by its sexual politics, which one might call of their time if they didn’t instead seem very much of their place. It’s not that Louise’s bisexuality is meant to seem exotic—it’s simply a premise of the narrative that she’s had relationships with Nikki and Alex—but that her subsequent involvements come across as a kind of trial by degradation that she’s supposed ultimately to transcend. At one point, Louise charts from an ironic distance the seven types of clubland lesbian, as if they were characters or images from a card game. She gets involved with the seventeen-year-old seeming-ingénue Inès, who happens to be seeing Alex, and so sparks jealous desperation in their mutual friend Pallas, but none of these people (see also Nikki) are very persuasive as characters—instead they seem to exist solely to be escaped from.
On the other hand, there are the things you would naturally want a book about bisexual French ravers to be good at describing: sex, drugs, music, and a certain sophisticated exhaustion with all of the above. Prose descriptions of techno or the effects of club drugs can be every bit as persuasive on the page as TV and Hollywood movie depictions of illicit raves and packed clubs were in the 1990s and early 2000s—even we sober wallflowers will laugh and groan if you get it wrong. At its best, Superstars forgets for a while its predictable plot arc and gets lost in the various ecstasies at Louise’s disposal, forces that are also having their way with her. At one point, Louise observes of techno: “Anyone who says this music is cold and inhuman should have their head checked.” She is looking for a libidinal energy larger than herself, whether in sex, drugs, or music. Superstars is among other things a story about parallel desires for something inhuman and ego-destroying—a familiar tale about letting art be the less grueling or fatal version of that satisfaction.
Brian Dillon’s memoir Ambivalence: An Education is published in September by New York Review Books. He is working on Charisma, a novel.