The 7th Function is a satiric romp through the upper echelons of Parisian intellectual life, indicting anyone – Sollers, for example – who takes the signified more seriously than the signifier. Yet it also has a serious point to make about the power of language to shape reality ... It is also very entertaining, like a dirty Midnight in Paris for the po-mo set; look out for Bernard Henri-Lévy getting fondled by Lacan’s mistress at a dinner party hosted by Julia Kristeva, or Judith Butler in a threesome with Bayard and Hélène Cixous ... But in the end, The 7th Function of Language isn’t (only) playing for lowbrow/highbrow laughs; it’s a mise en scène of conflicting ideas about Frenchness. In an election year that saw Marine Le Pen get dangerously close to the French presidency, Binet’s postmodern policier asks where the nation is going, and what kind of car it will drive to get there.

...a cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia ... In addition to some challenging thickets of language theory, the novel is packed with drama — car chases, mutilations, suicide, graphic sex, and multiple murders. There are Russian spies, Bulgarian assassins, Venetian thugs, Japanese saviors, a wily North African gigolo — Foucault's pendant! — and a secret debating society in which the stakes range from digital amputation to castration. Sam Taylor's deft translation encompasses heavy linguistic exegeses, political discussions, oratory duels, and even some puns, including echo and Eco ... Like Nabokov's Lolita, this wonderfully clever novel can be enjoyed on multiple levels. But to fully appreciate its ingenious metafictional complexities, be prepared to do some Googling.

At once a buddy-cop plot, a fish-out-of-water comedy and a spy thriller, Bayard and Herzog’s adventures become exercises in incongruity ... Along the way, no small pleasure is to be had from the amusing, sometimes scabrous, satirical portraiture of illustrious figures ... On its surface it’s a romp, then, a burlesque set in a time when literary theory was at its cultural zenith; knowing, antic, amusingly disrespectful and increasingly zany as it goes on ... The parodic idea of a world where secret agents and government ministers pursue the insights of literary theorists ends up less a pointed satire than an occasion to gather a crowd of beloved figures into one narrative — and maybe a way to mask affection ... The baroque workings of the novel’s detective plot spin into dizzying exhaustion. What works best here is a quality reminiscent of Barthes: the narrative’s attentiveness, particularly to sharp details that resist the effort to read them as clues.

But all of this —deciphering the mysteries of the seventh function and figuring out who killed Barthes—isn’t why you keep reading. Sure, mystery propels the book forward, though we’re certainly not going to get the clean resolutions Brecht thinks we want: The Seventh Function revels in a world where randomness and madness reign. What really drives the book is Binet’s irreverence—Philippe Sollers is a loudmouth dandy, Foucault masturbates to a Mick Jagger poster, Umberto Eco gets urinated on by a stranger in a Bologna bar. All of this might lead you to think of Binet as a writer of long-form libel. But Binet’s cheek is grounded in a serious familiarity with and respect for the theories, if not the personalities, he uses to populate his book ... For all its lightness and raucous humor, The 7th Function can sometimes feel a little heavy handed, especially when it comes to the blurring of fiction and nonfiction ... In spite of this, what’s most shocking is that Binet’s novel works, although perhaps more to draw attention to our mad, mad world than to help reconcile us to it as Brecht hoped—for that, we might need more than the fictional seventh function of language.

The first part of the book, set in Paris and featuring a roll call of intellectual luminaries, is pitch-perfect in its evocation of early-1980s French society — and contains hilarious, often polyphonic, set pieces ... The picaresque plot begins to flag, however, when the two protagonists hook up with Umberto Eco in Bologna and at Cornell University, where Jacques Derrida is torn asunder by dogs and Sollers castrated ... The strands of the plot are skilfully interwoven through a dual process of fictionalisation of the real and realisation of the fictional ... Although highly entertaining at times, The 7th Function of Language fails to live up to its title. Everything, including the most obvious allusions (like the ubiquitous Citroën DS that Barthes compared to a Gothic cathedral) is spelt out. After all, what is the point of a roman à clef if the author provides us with all the keys?

Like Umberto Eco’s conspiracy classic, Foucault’s Pendulum, or Zoran Zivkovic’s Papyrus Trilogy, Laurent Binet — a professor of French literature in Paris — has produced an intellectual thriller that will be catnip to serious readers ... Before long, as in many golden-age mysteries, various characters start to die while mumbling enigmatic words such as 'Sophia,' 'Elle sait' and 'Echo.' None means what it seems ... Like HHhH, Binet’s post-modernist novel about the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, The Seventh Function of Language doesn’t just tell a story. Binet is also exploring the relationship between fiction and reality ... To my mind, Binet doesn’t really do enough with these familiar metafictional tropes, and he’s much better at satire and suspense.

Hearing this crowd natter won’t be everyone’s cup of tea; self-important intellectuals will strike some readers as more boring than brainy. It pays to remember that when the literary theory craze was at its height some 30 years ago, luminaries like these were celebrities; I’ll admit that encountering them again here made me nostalgic for a time when reading their seductive prose rocked my world ... as every good novelist knows, there’s more than one way to tell a tale. Once again, Binet’s telling is flat-out ingenious.

The pages of The Seventh Function of Language are scattered with forensic and semiotic breadcrumbs, and for those inclined to track them they comprise part of the Barthesian ‘pleasure of the text.’ As do the madly improbable cameos by so many intellectual superstars, who chatter away, or degrade themselves with drugs and alcohol and orgiastic sex, or suffer events and fates unlike anything that is known to have befallen them in real life. But Binet’s aim is not just to send up the egos and abstracted excesses of academia, or to reveal that discourse is subject to manipulation; it is to suggest that the ultimate aim of such manipulation is to wield real political power … Amusing and unsettling enough at first, the business becomes less tenable the more wildly Binet spins out his scenarios. To maximize his effects, the novel would have to be half as long, for little is gained by the repetitions.

Even as the pages rip by and the melodrama piles up — more murders, a suicide, some ritualized disfigurements — Binet acknowledges and delights in the silliness of it all ... So does it all work? Not as much as one would hope. Partly it’s a problem of what Jakobson calls the 'conative' function of language. Who, exactly, is the imagined audience for this book? To be sure, readers of theory will chuckle over the novel’s many cameos — there’s John Searle! there’s Jonathan Culler! — and happily identify its Easter eggs. But the Wikipedia-level engagement with ideas — a page on signification here, a paragraph on rhetoric and semiology there — will leave such readers unmoved. The theory isn’t made new, and the theorists are delightfully absurd but also terribly one-note ... Binet has written a perfect beach read about semiotics — no small feat. Yet he doesn’t show why we, professors and common readers alike, should care about theory once we’ve closed the book. By making the stakes of its ideas so cheekily high, The Seventh Function of Language drains them of their actual excitement. Binet gives us theory as melodrama, but he doesn’t give us theory as drama — that is, as a source and subject of real significance.

What if Barthes was in possession of a document of such immense power that it inspired murder? Such is the dizzying premise behind Laurent Binet’s frantic, Umberto Eco–esque The Seventh Function of Language … The Seventh Function of Language is like a self-perpetuating top that’s capable of generating its own ludicrous momentum, never slowing down enough to topple over. Binet knows his terrain intimately, crafting fantastic parodies of the real-life personalities of his star intellectuals but also integrating their ideas and disagreements in thoughtful, lively ways (don’t miss the sex scene that brings new meaning to Deleuze’s ‘body without organs’) … Binet’s accomplishment is to give this rich body of work a James Bond–esque makeover, both radiating a charismatic appeal and confidently winking at the very excesses that its detractors have tried to mock.

Have you dreamed of a better world, where such a globe-trotting conspiracy novel might feature your favorite continental theorists front and center? Have you wondered what would happen if Noam Chomsky and Camille Paglia got high and made out at a Cornell frat party? If you’ve answered yes to any or all of these questions, then The Seventh Function of Language is the book for you … The Seventh Function of Language is a great big joke of a novel, with enough physical comedy, action, adventure, linguistic tricks, puns, meta-jabs, asides, and winks to constantly keep the reader interested and rolling along, all while some of the greatest minds of the last half-century are punished, pilloried, and parodied.

Binet’s second novel is at once a mystery and a satire of mysteries, and though the storytelling is often baggy and thick with academic lingo, there’s more action than the intellectual setting implies. There are high-stakes motives (the 'seventh function' allegedly has mind-control powers), explosions, and a healthy amount of sex (male prostitutes play a critical role in the plot). But Binet also operates on a brainier level, giving some real-life drama to the likes of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, and other thinkers who dealt in linguistic abstractions ... A clever and surprisingly action-packed attempt to merge abstruse theory and crime drama.

...the mystery is really just an excuse for this loving inquiry into 20th-century intellectual history that seamlessly folds historical moments, such as Louis Althusser’s murder of his wife and the prison death of Antonio Gramsci, into a brilliant illustration of the possibilities left to the modern novel.