Dear Dickhead: A Novel

by Virginie Despentes Narrated by Patrick Zeller, Gina Rogers

Overview

The French novel taking the world by storm: an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons about sex, feminism, and addiction.



Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence-at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction-to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.



Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her breakthrough book: a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. We follow Rebecca and Oscar as they develop an unlikely friendship and argue over questions of right and wrong in a city-Paris-where pleasure, excess, and freedom rule the day, or used to. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable book from the author hailed by the Guardian as France's "rock and roll Zola."

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Dear Dickhead:

"The volleys between Oscar and Rebecca power the book . . . It’s a thrill to hear the characters develop on the page. Both are sarcastic, vulnerable, lacerating, consistently surprising . . . It’s also one of the better portrayals of addiction I’ve encountered in literature, up there with books by Jean Rhys and Leslie Jamison." ―Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review

"Engrossing . . . [Despentes's] writing remains highly acute. But it has become more sober, patient and full of emotional suspense . . . Frank Wynne delivers a finely tuned translation." ―Pamela Druckerman, Financial Times

"A hilariously profane novel that addresses the complexities of sexual harassment and addiction." ―Dana Spiotta, Vogue

"Zoé [offers] blistering polemics that are ferocious, provocative, and often intensely funny . . . [Her] righteous fury is electric, and Despentes compellingly presents her as a casualty of male privilege . . . In Dear Dickhead, the letter becomes a venue for this kind of ruthless taking stock of one’s self through frictive, uncomfortable dialogue with another person . . . Rebecca has a way of whittling complex insights about sex and gender into sentences that have the compressed fury of a two-minute punk song." ―Anahid Nersessian, The New Yorker

"Nuanced and redemptive . . . This is the most optimistic novel of Despentes’s career. It also may be the most subversive . . . France’s most unforgiving dispenser of fictional vengeance upon male oppressors has maintained her cultural edge by meting out grace instead." ―Marc Weingarten, The Atlantic

"Frank Wynne swings Despentes’s French into confidently contemporary English . . . Despentes pulls it off with a brio that’s wholly characteristic . . . The energy of Despentes’s voice kept me on her side, and rooting for Oscar, Rebecca and Zoé as they navigated their lives with varying degrees of failure, distress and, occasionally, hope." ―Erica Wagner, The Telegraph

"[Full of] lots of highly entertaining Bernhardian rants on the subject of men v. women, generation v. generation, and more." ―John Self, The Guardian

"A bitingly humorous conversation about addiction, lockdown, cancellation, and, ultimately, friendship." —Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

"A rare beast—a literary work that successfully uses an old-fashioned form to speak refreshingly to the current moment . . . A novel of uncommon depth and poignancy . . . Subversive, disruptive, and infused with a punk sensibility . . . [A] triumph." ―David Vogel, Words Without Borders

"Epic . . . Brash and provocative . . . [A] riveting exploration of feminism and sexism . . . Readers will be awed." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Rebecca, Oscar, and Zoé come across as real people and their interactions with each other manifestly change them . . . Grounded in real human emotion and experience.” ―Kirkus Reviews

"Despentes’s unsparing directness and fluid style are well served by Wynne’s translation; nothing is lost . . . Funny, raw, compelling.” ―Library Journal

Praise for the Vernon Subutex trilogy:

"The zeitgeistiest thing I ever read . . . I tore through these books the minute they were published . . . These novels with their depth and detail kick TV's sorry ass." ―Nell Zink, Bustle

"[Despentes] has produced a bona fide magnum opus . . . doing for Paris what Joyce did for Dublin." ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"[Despentes] writes wickedly about people watching their privilege evaporate in real time and reacting with the full range of human ugliness . . . What fun." ―Molly Young, Vulture

"[The] prose is so powerful, and so perfect, that we forget we’re even reading. Opening up [Vernon Subutex] is more like stepping inside a thrilling, pulsing party and getting instantly mesmerized by the whirling couple at the center of the crowd." ―Jennifer Croft, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Masterly . . . [Despentes] resembles, by turns, William Gibson, George Eliot and Michel Houellebecq." ―Chris Kraus, The Times Literary Supplement

"[An] extraordinary act of creation and destruction, a realistic Paris evoked, transformed, and torn apart." ―Nadja Spiegelman, New York Review of Books

"Virginie Despentes is a true original, a punk-rock George Eliot with a keen taste for the pitiable innards of her characters: no one else has her slyly penetrating eye, her spiky sense of humor, her razor wit that cuts like wire through the accumulated crud of our age's default thought patterns . . A droll, hilarious, insightful record of our unfortunate times." ―Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

Kirkus Reviews

2024-07-19
A provocative French writer and filmmaker explores #MeToo, the fate of aging actresses, and addiction.

“Dude, screw your apologies, screw your monologue, screw everything: there’s nothing about you that interests me.” This is the opening line of Rebecca Latté’s email response to Oscar Jayack, a novelist who’s trying to apologize for a (since deleted) post in which he excoriated her for no longer being the same person—the same body—that boys like him once fantasized about. Despite her claim that Oscar is boring, Rebecca continues to reply to his emails, and the two develop a relationship that is vital to both of them and shaped not just by their shared working-class childhood, but also by the fact that Oscar’s older sister was Rebecca’s best friend back in the 1980s. There is a third party in this story: Zoé Katana, a feminist blogger who has publicly accused Oscar of sexually harassing her while she was assigned by his publisher to work as his publicist. This is an epistolary novel shaped by contemporary modes of communication, but it’s still an epistolary novel, which is not a forgiving form—or even a believable form, much of the time. Opinions about whether or not Despentes pulls this off depend largely on how much the reader enjoys listening to three hyperverbal, theory-inclined people talk to and at and over each other. That said, Despentes gives readers plenty of reason to stick around, beginning with Rebecca’s refusal to put up with Oscar’s shit. His response to being canceled after he’s outed as a sex pest is predictably self-serving, and his new confidante will have none of it. At the same time, Rebecca comes to see Oscar as a role model in sobriety. Meanwhile, she serendipitously connects with Zoé while Paris is locked down because of Covid-19, which complicates her relationship with Oscar. What makes this novel work as a novel—rather than a collection of rants presented as a novel—is that Rebecca, Oscar, and Zoé come across as real people and their interactions with each other manifestly change them.

Confrontational and often abstract, but grounded in real human emotion and experience.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193492832
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/21/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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