The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan
"Tanguy Viel's parody/pastiche of the American novel is subtle and experimental; it tells a story at the same time as it implicitly poses questions about the narrative structure it is deploying." —The French Review

In The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, disappearance is both a theme and a stylistic device. Indeed, this publication narrates the disappearance of Dwayne Koster, who, fascinated by the story of Jim Sullivan, commits suicide in the New Mexico desert which was the setting of the rocker’s disappearance in 1975. But this novel is for the most part set in the metanarrative tale of its own genesis, and, as a result, is partially eclipsed: its -fictitious- author doesn’t relate it in its entirety and keeps adding bits and pieces of first drafts and preliminary sketches to his text, thus blurring its boundaries. Tanguy Viel’s work can therefore be perceived as a double response, existential and aesthetic, to the question of the end.
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The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan
"Tanguy Viel's parody/pastiche of the American novel is subtle and experimental; it tells a story at the same time as it implicitly poses questions about the narrative structure it is deploying." —The French Review

In The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, disappearance is both a theme and a stylistic device. Indeed, this publication narrates the disappearance of Dwayne Koster, who, fascinated by the story of Jim Sullivan, commits suicide in the New Mexico desert which was the setting of the rocker’s disappearance in 1975. But this novel is for the most part set in the metanarrative tale of its own genesis, and, as a result, is partially eclipsed: its -fictitious- author doesn’t relate it in its entirety and keeps adding bits and pieces of first drafts and preliminary sketches to his text, thus blurring its boundaries. Tanguy Viel’s work can therefore be perceived as a double response, existential and aesthetic, to the question of the end.
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The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan

The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan

The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan
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The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan

The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan

Overview

"Tanguy Viel's parody/pastiche of the American novel is subtle and experimental; it tells a story at the same time as it implicitly poses questions about the narrative structure it is deploying." —The French Review

In The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, disappearance is both a theme and a stylistic device. Indeed, this publication narrates the disappearance of Dwayne Koster, who, fascinated by the story of Jim Sullivan, commits suicide in the New Mexico desert which was the setting of the rocker’s disappearance in 1975. But this novel is for the most part set in the metanarrative tale of its own genesis, and, as a result, is partially eclipsed: its -fictitious- author doesn’t relate it in its entirety and keeps adding bits and pieces of first drafts and preliminary sketches to his text, thus blurring its boundaries. Tanguy Viel’s work can therefore be perceived as a double response, existential and aesthetic, to the question of the end.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781628973716
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date: 06/15/2021
Series: French Literature
Pages: 92
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tanguy Viel was born in Brest in 1973. He is the author of several novels, including Le Black Note, Cinéma, The Absolute Perfection of Crime (winner of the Prix Fénéon and the Prix littéraire de la vocation), Beyond Suspicion, Paris-Brest, The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, and, most recently, Article 353 (winner of the Grand prix RTL-Lire and the Prix François Mauriac). He lives near Orléans, France.



Tanguy Viel was born in Brest in 1973. He is the author of several novels, including Le Black Note, Cinéma, The Absolute Perfection of Crime (winner of the Prix Fénéon and the Prix littéraire de la vocation), Beyond Suspicion, Paris-Brest, The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, and, most recently, Article 353 (winner of the Grand prix RTL-Lire and the Prix François Mauriac). He lives near Orléans, France.



Clayton McKee is a PhD student in Comparative literature at UCLA. His research focuses on literary translation of gender- and sexuality-based identities of exiled authors between Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. He is also an author, editor, and translator.

Read an Excerpt

When spring comes to Detroit, what you can do is take a car ride beyond Eight Mile Road to the banks of Lake Saint Clair, or go walking on the Wayne County Port Docks to watch the cargo ships go back up the big lakes under the Ambassador Bridge—long ships that will surely never see the sea, but sometimes appear as if they were there, because in the middle of Lake Erie or Lake Michigan, you’d think you were out at sea, so much so that the gusts stir up the surface of the water like in the Atlantic. The locks are what make the giant leaps between the lakes, and the channels are where the carriers languish filled with wheat or coal. In Detroit, you’d sometimes believe to be at a port on the high seas, ready to see a Nantucket whaling boat suddenly appear, because other than a few large oil tankers drafting in the depths, you can see everything on the big lakes: yachts, cargo ships, large sailboats, fishing boats, old sailing boats, and motorboats.

It’s in this backdrop that we met Dwayne Koster for the first time, not really on the banks of the big lakes but in the suburbs of Detroit, at the steering wheel of an old 1969 Dodge Coronet, without us knowing right away why he’s there, in his car, looking like a cop on patrol, cruising the streets and unsure about exactly what he’s looking for. That is until, rather quickly, we see him stopping on one of those long roads that extends from east to west for ten or so miles where the city’s already growing dull and giving way to the large trees that shelter the houses. This is the first scene of my book: a guy parked in a white car with the engine cut in the wintry chill, where the attributes of his life slowly take shape. A bottle of whiskey on the passenger seat, cigarettes messily heaped in the overflowing ashtray, various magazines on the backseat (one on fishing, of course, one on baseball, of course), and a copy of Walden in the trunk along with a hockey stick.

Sitting there at the steering wheel of his old Dodge, he stares at the lit-up windows of a house, on whose mailbox we can read the name Fraser. Although we don’t know it yet, Fraser is his ex-wife’s last name, and thus, we don’t know what that means for Dwayne Koster parked there in the falling evening, but there are enough clues and nervousness that what we do know is that he isn’t there for no reason.

He could spend hours posted there in the snow that stuck to the wheels—I wrote—shielded from the dogs that came to piss on the door. He was in a solitude that would’ve made us say that he played in a Finnish film due to the cold that massacred his lips, the parka and gloves that no longer sufficed (since there was no question of leaving the motor running for the heater), and, at this time in his life anyway—from what we understood as well—the fact that he wanted this, to be stung by the cold and snow and chilled to the bone.

In the moment that we met him at the beginning of the book, it must be said that Dwayne Koster seemed to be removed from normal life, if a normal life is what he’d tried to construct during the past twenty years and now what fled him like sand, if a normal life was from now on vanished images of his old home, his two kids, Tim and Dorothy, a happy life with Susan, and memories from a honeymoon at Niagara Falls (Room 207 at the Bristol Hotel, the mist came in through the window).

But all of this—I wrote—all of these things that he saw again, as if in a dream through the windshield of his Dodge, were foreclosed, so to speak, in a far-off place, an old life which only remained on his face as an irremovable mourning. There, lost in the night of Michigan—I continued—the only thing that comforted Dwayne Koster was to come across his favorite Jim Sullivan album on his car radio and to listen to songs like “Highways” or “UFO” on repeat, telling himself it was a shame that the entire world didn’t listen to a singer like him, and that it’s also a shame that he, Jim Sullivan, had disappeared under such strange conditions.

I don’t know if it’s time to bring this up, but the fact is that there are still a lot of mysterious things about Jim Sullivan’s disappearance, which occurred about forty years ago in the New Mexican desert. They found his car on the desert’s edge, but they never found his body nor any trace of a struggle or a presence, only his Coccinelle parked somewhere near Santa Rosa, windows and doors closed and without even the slightest damage or sign of forced entry. It’s true that this type of thing in America, especially when you’re a bit of a mystical singer and your best-known song is called “UFO,” leads certain fans to believe, without a doubt, that Jim Sullivan had been abducted by aliens. Others allude to the settlement of debts by a local mafia, still others on police error. Either way, it’s true that the disappearance of Jim Sullivan remains a mystery, one that, naturally, fascinated Dwayne Koster. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have titled my book The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan.

But Dwayne Koster had other things to think about besides Jim Sullivan when behind the curtains of 224 Romeo Street he saw Susan Fraser’s silhouette appear, the same silhouette that for a long time, Dwayne regretted, carried the name Koster before retaking her maiden name. It was precisely this sort of thing that made him drink a little more. His eyes burned from the overwhelming tobacco smoke inside the car, or possibly just from the excess of everything in his body, seeing that the bottle of whiskey sitting in the passenger seat hadn’t been full for quite some time.

Seeing him there in the snow which melted before his eyes, it would’ve been difficult to believe that this was the same man who for twenty years had put on a well-pressed suit, a white shirt, and a rather colorful tie every morning to go to the University of Michigan, since he was a professor at the university.

I also noticed that in American novels, one of the main characters was always a university professor, often at Yale or Princeton, but in either case, a college with a name that resonated around the world—although for my part, I spent a long time figuring out where Dwayne Koster would teach before realizing that he lived in Detroit, so it was logical that he’d have a job at the closest university. As I was able to find out, it was in Ann Arbor, which is the name of a small town in the suburbs of Detroit, and it’s also an excellent university—even if it isn’t as prestigious as Berkeley or UCLA.

What I imagined right away in Ann Arbor was Dwayne Koster’s big office with books on all sides, a view of the cut grass on campus, and dozens of students who’d just sat down in a lecture hall dressed like Americans with plaid shirts and Converse on their feet, and who at the end of class came to ask Dwayne some questions about literature, because I haven’t yet mentioned it, but Dwayne Koster taught literature, American of course. He’d even defended his dissertation about the influence of Moby-Dick on the contemporary novel—although I never insisted too much on that for fear of being boring. On his office door window, like the ones at police stations that you see in movies, there was his name engraved in the glass: Dr. Dwayne Koster.

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