Just finished reading Things: A Story Of The Sixties by Georges Perec. I’d read Perfection by Vincenzo Latronica and wanted to go back to the source. A succinct and remarkable piece of work and altogether the superior novel, with which I’m sure Signor Latronica would heartily concur.
The book’s two main characters – or perhaps I should call them ciphers, since they seem only to be symbols of a greater malaise than fleshed-out human beings (apart from two brief slivers near the book’s end, there is no dialogue from either) – Jérôme and Sylvie are young, impatient, ambitious, gullible, easily bored and not happy. Their primary flaw – if “flaw” is the apt adjective – is that they never see things through. They drop out of university, hence lack the qualifications that back in the early sixties – the novel was published in 1965 – would have easily allowed them to pursue professional careers. They love being in their early twenties and living like the students they briefly were, but can’t – indeed, won’t - move on.
At the same time the pair are fatally attracted by the baubles of capitalism – hence the novel’s title. If only they could amass more things, the “right” things, the most fashionable things, what Robert Elms would once have described as the “correctest” things. Nothing they were particularly likely to love or cherish; just things they felt they “ought” to have, as though doing so would make them automatically more fashionable, and therefore “better” people.
The two live in Paris and can’t really afford anything there, which is the worst situation to be in when you’re in a big city. There ensues much frustration and more than a bit of tension. They get more things by means of the modest income from their inevitably transient jobs as on-the-street market researchers and the relatively low cost of living in early sixties Paris (if you weren’t too fussy).
Jérôme and Sylvie, however, are steadily getting older; too old to be asking questions of people in the street, too old to be living like overripe teenagers – and, moreover, their circle of friends (“acquaintances” would be a more fitting term) are gradually drifting away from them, getting “proper” jobs and mortgages, getting married, having children and so forth, leaving them absolutely stranded. The lovable clutter of things in their apartment is beginning to suffocate them. And they fear it.
In an effort to break away from this amiably destructive loop, the two apply for teaching jobs in Tunisia. They think they’ll go to Tunis itself, hang out and be cool. But that isn’t quite how it works and they find themselves in a city called Sfax, a rather long way from Tunis. Sylvie earns enough from her primary school work – and both from subletting their Paris apartment - to keep both going and they find themselves an inexpensive and rather large apartment in which to live.
But their frustration persists. Sfax isn’t Paris, or their concept of Paris. From Perec’s initial descriptions it presents itself as a one-horse, or one-donkey, town where nothing much happens, even with the incremental introduction of various elements, such as international restaurants and multiple cinemas. The pair get bored to the point where that adjective might turn into a transitive verb, as though boredom is being drilled into them. They feel trapped. They cease to “live.”
Not once in their eight months in Sfax do Jérôme or Sylvie appear to make the slightest effort to engage with anybody else in the city, or with their language or culture. They end up always on the outside because they’re determined to preserve their selves (those two words were intentional) as outsiders.
It can’t continue, and so they return with slight reluctance to Paris. As soon as they make their way out of Sfax, Perec gently unveils the gigantic mistake they have made – as well as changing the novel’s tense from present to perspectival past. Gradually Sfax is revealed to be a rather large, colourful, cosmopolitan city. The author tells us, in a melancholy if not mournful fashion, that if only Jérôme and Sylvie had things out, made a serious attempt to integrate with the city’s people and worked long, well and patiently enough to see things through – as opposed to “things” with their chimerical promise of instant happiness - their situation would have improved and they would have most likely ended up working in higher positions in Tunis, paid well enough to provide them with a fine house and a car.
As soon as they return to Paris, Jérôme and Sylvie realise their dreadful mistake; the wide expanses suddenly become narrow and cramped. They have outgrown their old lives whether they like it or not. It is therefore unsurprising that they ultimately give in and find (or their friends find for them) “proper” “grown-up” jobs as middle managers in a marketing research company in Bordeaux. Perec ends the novel with the pair travelling in an otherwise deserted first-class train carriage towards their new life, and concludes with an ambiguously metaphorical comment on the food that they are served on that train, followed by a telling quote from Karl Marx about how the “means” matter as much, or matter more, than any “result.”
Jérôme and Sylvie have turned, and only partially unwillingly, into bourgeoisie. In Perfection Tom and Anna are saved by being bequeathed the farm of their recently-deceased uncle. They see an opportunity. This occurs in the late summer of 2019. Their plan sounds idyllic. What could possibly happen to spoil it?
If Covid is the elephant in Perfection’s front room, then the 1968 Paris riots retrospectively and inadvertently serve the same purpose in Things. Of course there was no way that the Perec of 1965 could have known what was going to happen three years hence, but the feeling does remain that Jérôme and Sylvie have become what once they beheld; their enemy, or possibly what, deep down, they had always craved to be but just couldn’t admit to themselves.
Things isn’t primarily a critique of what capitalism does to people and might have more to do with what people decide to do to, or with, themselves. If you want capitalism’s baubles you have to work and serve capitalism in order to be able to afford them. Without what Kubrick called “fuck you money” it is impossible to live the type of life Jérôme and Sylvie want to live – pleasure without commitment, reaping without sowing. You can’t stay twenty-two forever, which time of life in any case tends to be only rosy and golden when viewed in retrospect. You have to build, to be able to contribute, to listen and react. The system to which Jérôme and Sylvie ultimately and grudgingly surrender is far from perfect, as a glance at the state of the world in 2026 will immediately tell you, but (to paraphrase Harry Callaghan) until somebody comes up with a better and workable system, we’re stuck with it, and you have to do your best within its deceptively limited parameters.
Hence, if Things is about any “thing,” it’s about human beings’ stubborn refusal to move on with their lives. Tell me about it. When I was in my early thirties a junior registrar at Charing Cross Hospital, who was perhaps 2-3 years older than me (therefore about to pass his exams and become a consultant), excitedly told me about how he was about to become a father. Me? I was punk rock; mortgages and families were for squares, daddy-o. Laura got the urge for the latter but by the time that happened it was too late. David (sorry David, I can’t remember your surname; it was more than thirty years ago) laughed agreeably and said trust me, by the time you get to my age the urge will hit you.
But it never really did. I don’t spend sleepless nights lamenting the fact that I never got to be a father – given what my father was like to me in my early years, I was afraid that I’d turn out like him (and, in terms of heart problems, I did; thanks, dad) – but the thought that I’ll most likely die working since I can’t afford to retire, as the pension isn’t going to pay the rent, does bother me somewhat. Yes, you are (or were – these days, nobody can really afford to do any of it any more) obliged to live your life like a capitalist ticksheet – school, university, career, car, mortgage, marriage, family. Anything outside that sturdy, steady, unengaging, life-denying path is “abnormal,” renders you “lesser” in the system’s eyes.
Jérôme and Sylvie (getting back to the novel, and about bloody time), however, don’t really know what they want. They desire the good life without wanting to do the work that will enable them to achieve it. They believe the lying advertisements, the spurious endorsements, but don’t believe the soul-crushing, spirit-squashing jobs that they’ll have to do to give them access to their uplifting pledges. They want something for nothing and I’m afraid that isn’t how life works.
And yes, I read their story and sympathise to a degree, but can never truly empathise with them, because they are presented with many opportunities to change their lives fundamentally, almost all of which they reject. So yes – “things” are feeble and temporary, but “things” are not life. There’s a moment near the novel’s end where Jérôme and Sylvie clear out their Paris apartment and suddenly and shockingly realise just how spacious it actually was and what they could have done to make it an actual home. The concluding implication of the book is that they won’t make the same mistake in their own lives – there will be the choice furniture they want, and plenty of bookshelves, but no mention of any books being placed on them; they got rid of that (presumably largely unread) “clutter.” Lots of space and…emptiness. You fill your life with things to avoid the dread of the empty, perhaps even to erect a fortress between yourself and the world. People, you see, are not perfect.
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