Dimitri Verhulst wrote a novel full of stylized outbursts and well-formed nonsense

The new novel by Dimitri Verhulst (1972) is notable for how it is told, more than for what it is told. The writer said in an interview Het Parool recently that that was also his intention. Because as a reader you forget what a book is about, what the characters are called and what exactly they experience, Verhulst claimed. “Take One hundred years of loneliness by Gabriel García Máquez. I really enjoyed reading that, but all I remember is how it was written. There too I had the feeling that the narrative style was actually the subject.” He also believes that “the style of a work of art should explain its subject.” In other words: that form and content must coincide.

A warned man is worth nothing consists of paragraphs that take up one sentence, and the narrator makes a habit of barely connecting those sentences. From the bottom line, is the formative principle of this novel. So on a random page we jump from a memory of a teenage crush of the main character to a wisdom about self-love, to an observation about a microwave meal and a statement about cheap wine, to a wit about obsolete Wordfeud words, a fact about a special Japanese word, a complaint about loneliness, and then to a fantasy about the father of the main character and a conclusion about him: “His smoker’s cough is my most important heirloom.”

Yes, it’s about something at the end. But before you get there, you make your way through the noise, through the veek – the word that Verhulst himself quotes, for the waste that the sea leaves behind at the high tide line. This is a novel full of veek, a tidal wave of banalities. The example above is no exception; I could also have taken the page where it first talks about French motorways, then about the main character’s disinterest in the music of Philip Glass, which is followed by a statement about the fascistic character of the concept of ‘right to exist’ and a wisecrack about the neglected stream of ignoranceand then a comment about expensive cars.

Lipstick red scarf

It’s like reading someone’s collected tweets: stylized regurgitation, well-formed nonsense. Because someone here has put a lot of effort into polishing and polishing his meager, almost meaningless messages: “The woman taking photographs on the beach yesterday, she with the lipstick-red scarf and hat, I felt that in everything, could have put a smile on my face.” That work. Verhulst is a writer who likes to plant a flag in a turd, who wants to make something beautiful out of the ugly, but in this kind of tinkering what is most striking is the complacency.

Which of course could also be the intention – and probably is. Because it can make you crazy, because of that nonsense that is certainly not easy to read, and you can be irritated by the lousy formulations, but if you approach that way of telling with a sympathetic attitude, there is something in it. Indeed, form follows content: many of the thoughts that float in and out of our heads are bland, banal and uninteresting, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It was Verhulst’s ambition to “make visible the incredible banality of life,” he said in the aforementioned interview. That banality is not only visible in this novel, but also palpable.

The main character Eric Finck is a retired filmmaker, because he is abandoned, depressed, miserable, full of self-pity and self-loathing. Settled in Ostend, he fills his days with cheap wine and microwave meals, strumming jazz numbers on the piano. And by ranting about his failed marriage to a woman he calls Yatzy, and thinking back to his youth, his prematurely deceased father (“It’s half past six, I’ve been fatherless for thirty-five years, officially”) and his mother, who put her personal freedom above her motherly love. “As far as I can remember, my mother simply didn’t love anything, she was never given the gift of love.” And: “She preferred her pimples to me.”

Shrimp croquettes

That is still a bit too hyperbolic to feel honest or truthful, but hey, there are certainly lines to be discerned, matters to which the narrating Finck returns, and they concern not only shrimp croquettes and wine bottles with screw caps, but also his own formation. Although: ‘formation’ is too strong a word, because Verhulst’s main character lacks any real interest in it. In the first chapters the form is still convincing, as Verhulst manages to plausibly associate banal stomach pain with essential childhood memories. In later chapters there is sometimes an attempt at psychologization, but Finck is not interested in real self-examination. Toiling through the mud of banality yields precious little for the reader.

Verhulst’s melancholy, which you usually have to face with an almost overdose of empathetic benevolence, takes its revenge. Finck has no interest or confidence in dealing with his difficult bond with his mother, because, well, the measly human being is not capable of growth or self-improvement at all, is he? That may be the case, but in line with that belief, the novel also lacks development. What remains is a character who entrenches himself in a foxhole of self-loathing and what he has to say unfortunately (and unsurprisingly) sounds to the clichéd tune of misogyny and misrecognition. We know that song. What is being said here is going to be insurmountably contradictory.

“I remember that as a little boy I liked to hide, most of the time under the table, because I wanted to be found,” says the adult Finck, marinating in self-pity. He hasn’t made any progress yet.

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