The First Thing You See (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2013) by Gregoire Delacourt (translated from the French by Anthea Bell) is a story about a young mechanic, Arthur Dreyfuss, who lives alone in the tiny village of Long in France. One day he opens his door to find a distraught Hollywood starlet on his doorstep – none other than Scarlett Johansson. Only it transpires that this is not the famous American actress, but rather a Frenchwoman, Jeanine Foucamprez, who has arrived with a truckload of emotional baggage. The Scarlett lookalike and the star-struck mechanic embark upon a week of falling in love, while the townspeople of Long go mad with conjecture and desire.
This is quite an odd little tale, quite warm and quirky, with some flashes of brilliance in the form of quips about life and love. There are deeper messages about the shallowness of physical beauty, the search for physical perfection and the downside to fame. There are even messages about such serious issues as childhood abuse and trauma, parental abandonment, grief and loss. Jeanine is described as ‘…her feminine charms, her mouth like a ripe fruit, that sacred je ne sais quoi (although everyone knows what it is) that makes men unhappy, brutal and crazy, and women distrustful, feverish and cruel.’ But unfortunately, the early promise of the novel doesn’t pay off. Its flippancy dilutes its seriousness, and the issues of substance are lost to lightweight banter and superficiality. The novel’s visceral scenes (such as the disappearance of Arthur’s two-year-old sister into the mouth and stomach of the neighbour’s Dobermann, emerging later into a steaming pile) detract from its more poetic moments. There were times I felt on the verge of being transported to some great esoteric place of meaning, only to be dumped rather unceremoniously again at the foot of banality.
The most interesting thing about this book is probably the furore surrounding its release in English, which the actress Scarlett Johansson tried to prevent by court order, and which eventually resulted in her successfully suing the author. His use of her name, her body, her reputation and her personal details is intimate and intrusive, and I’m not surprised she wasn’t happy with the result. My verdict? A strange book that occasionally teetered on the verge of something profound, but never quite made it over the line, with an ending that is melodramatic and unlikely.
The First Thing You See – Gregoire Delacourt
