Kitty Corner: Bouillier is an expert in genre pastiche

Grégoire Bouillier’s “The Mystery Guest” begins like any noir novel — with the ringing of the telephone jolting its owner awake.  

Except the call doesn’t come in the middle of the night during a raging thunderstorm. It comes in the late afternoon on a gloomy, humid Sunday, while the narrator is taking a nap. And the woman on the other end of the phone is not the mysterious femme fatale; it’s Bouillier’s ex-girlfriend from six years ago, who, after four years with her, got up and left without a warning. Also, the book isn’t fiction — it’s a memoir, though Bouillier purposely leaves ambiguous which elements are true and which have been embellished.

His girlfriend has called to invite him to be the “mystery guest” at the 37th birthday party of Sophie Calle, a French conceptual artist. Between 1980 and 1993, Calle threw birthday parties and invited the same number of guests as the age she was turning, plus one extra stranger to symbolize the upcoming year of her life. Bouillier’s ex-girlfriend is in charge of procuring the mystery guest this year, and he is the first person she thought of.

Disoriented from his nap and caught completely off-guard by the sound of her voice, Bouillier immediately agrees to attend. After, he is thrown into turmoil. The call was brief and perfunctory, and she has provided only the time, date and address of the party — no explanation, no professions of guilt or sorrow for her disappearance from the relationship six years prior. He then launches into a tortured soliloquy, a private cri de coeur, one that continues straight up to and throughout the party.

Even though Bouillier’s ex ignores him for the majority of the party, suffice to say that he finds the closure that he’s looking for. And the only clues she gives him are a bouquet of roses and a line from Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” I don’t want to spoil it, but the reasoning behind her dramatic exit is quite genius, and I will be deploying her excuse on all the boys I’ve ever ghosted. (Although the book was published in 2004, and the term “ghosting” had not yet entered the cultural lexicon.)

“The Mystery Guest” has the flavor of Albert Camus’ “The Stranger.” Both are slim volumes, translated from French, that chronicle the inner monologues of bookish, intellectual, somewhat emo Frenchmen who are largely inclined to take a dim view of life. Bouillier identifies heavily with James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and Ulysses, the NASA space probe sent to orbit the sun. Absurdist themes are overt. For example, Bouillier resolves to bring, as a gift for Calle, an extremely expensive bottle of Margaux that cost more than his rent. Yet, at the party, an attendee blithely informs him that Calle never opens her birthday presents, preferring instead to display them in a cabinet case as vehicles for her art.

With its noir tropes and manic first-person narration, “The Mystery Guest” also reminds me greatly of Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy.” It reads like a detective novel, even though the stakes aren’t quite as high as murder. But who says that finding out why someone broke your heart is less important than finding out who killed your brother? Bouillier peppers his memoir with humor and witticisms, but it is a fundamentally vulnerable book detailing a period of deep emotional distress, and his hurt and suffering are palpable.

But there is a silver lining to this whole affair: Years later, Bouillier met Calle at a bar and became quite close with her. They became so close, in fact, that when Bouillier dumped her via email in 2007, she distributed the letter to 107 women and deemed it an art piece. Rest assured that what goes around comes around.

“The Mystery Guest” has something for everyone: noir fans, art enthusiasts and, of course, the unceremoniously dumped.

Kitty Guo is a junior writing about contemporary literature. Her column, “Kitty Corner,” runs every other Wednesday.