RaveThe NationFor books with so much plot, this trilogy is amazingly interior. It is a string of torrential confessionals in which each character gets at least one chapter. They reflect, at length, on their own social situations, which provides many of them with just cause for resentment ... Vernon Subutex is written as if to act not as literature exactly, in its typical arena, but rather head-to-head with the dominant culture—up against the edifice that she identifies. That logic of multiplication and diversity, the scale and the frenzy of invention in this trilogy, and Despentes’s own larger-than-life resourcefulness all have an aspect of horror, suggesing in their negative the vastness and intractability of the power in her sights.
