Not his type of Philippe Vilain

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Not his type by Philippe Vilain

If you must read the remarkable new novel by Philippe Vilain, Bad studentin bookstores since January 9, we can also profitably dive back into a work covering a number of successes like Not his type released in 2011 and adapted for the cinema by Lucas Belvaux in 2014. With this title referring to the narrator of Research by Marcel Proust who fell in love with a woman who was not his type, Vilain does not surprise his readers knowing the writer’s taste for memory games, wasted time, introspection and dead loves. Indeed, Jennifer, a hairdresser in a salon in Arras, was not the type of François, a Parisian philosophy professor exiled in Picardy three days a week in an attempt to interest the son of a bourgeois and proletarian in the subtleties of the cave of Plato.

Philippe Vilain © JF Paga / Grasset

However, this celibate by laziness, by independence and by refusal “ to choose between one dissatisfaction and another » will give in to the temptation of seducing this young woman who has “ the appearance of his profession, the guarded coquetry of the employees. » In the boredom and solitude of the province, our man examines his amorous emotions: “ All women were equal. I didn’t decide on any, sure of being able to love them all, that is to say incapable of loving just one, unaware of the extent to which the pleasure we seek from women is an escape, a way of forgetting ourselves. , to be bored, a void too, the vain multiplication of a desire which condemns itself to always missing its target ». Not his type reveals to us the condescension of this casual dreamer towards the one “ whose first name and clothing style spoke of bad taste ». «It seemed like she felt judged, that she was afraid of disappointing me», Regrets Don Juan of Arras.

A simple heart

About this thirty-year-old woman, raising her five-year-old son Dylan alone, reading horoscopes and celebrity magazines, choosing the films she sees based on the Hollywood starlet in them and whose greatest ambition would one day be of ” own your living room » ; Philippe Vilain offers us a portrait with two faces. The one described by the narrator who is politely heartbroken in the face of “Jenny’s” language tics and lack of refinement, of her diamond encrusted in her nostril, of her “ quavering laughter matched to the clinking of her junk bracelets » and that which the reader discovers under the pen of the writer, that is to say a simple and pure heart, a finer and more melancholic being which partly escapes the perception of a man cultivating a redemptive guilt , a pity that makes him feel “ to love him honestly ».

« No doubt I felt so bad because I noticed in her mediocre preferences, in her tastes as an employee, everything that separated us, because I guessed that I would never be able to get used to this setting, to her, to her culinary attentions, to her dresses, to her conformism, to her desire to please me, to her cheerfulness of which I knew the cause, to all that very thing which screamed her solitude, her expectations, the hopes that she had in me », thinks François for a moment before discovering that he had ultimately only wallowed in social contempt, the ordinary racism of a petty bourgeois inhabited by mimetic rivalry, narcissism and conformism.

Of Summer in Dresden has False father passing through Paris in the afternoonPhilippe Vilain has become the brilliant scrutinizer of the impulses of the heart and the passions of love. Not his type takes place in the work of a writer who excels at depicting the feeling of dereliction: “ I was like those planes which go into the night, which flash to signal their presence but which seem to go nowhere. In the end, François, his heart as empty as an apartment waiting for a new tenant, realizes that perhaps he was not Jennifer’s type. A disillusioned and poignant morality is born from this: “it is true that we are never, deep down, in the lives as in the hearts of others, only passing through. ».