Review: Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan (translated by Peter Valente and James Horton)

An “improvised morning orgy” is how Nicolas Pages starts, auspiciously. We’re in an apartment in Paris in May 1998 after a night at the club and the partying is kicking on into the daylight hours. “I’ve never known how. To live. Too hard,” Guillaume Dustan writes, as himself, “Thank God there are drugs”. Present at the orgy is one Nicolas Pages who Guillaume met at a recent writing event: “Vodka on ice. I looked at him. He looked at me. That’s when it started to get serious”. Nicolas is a Swiss author and artist, “like me but not like me”. Like everyone in this novel, Nicolas is probably a real person (a gossipy glossary of characters and places is more amusing than enlightening) but try Googling him and you’ll find only what might be traces. You will, however, find this book.

So begins “the great novel of homosexual love”. Or maybe it’s a “sex project”. Or maybe they’re the same thing. Nicolas Pages unfolds in diaristic real-time. There are the foreshadowed ejaculations, drugs and club nights, but there is also shopping, cooking and a full range of hangovers in equal measure. Plenty of the novel is spent at the local Monoprix, in “the Zen of the supermarket”. In the third chapter, another novel takes over, a record of Guillaume’s first loves in the early ’90s, his time spent in Tahiti for a diplomatic posting (he attended France’s prestigious École nationale d’administration) and becoming HIV-positive. Then another novel intrudes. Then his grandmother’s diaries. Then essays on homosexuality, literature, odes to drugs, clubbing and house music written for one of Paris’ gay magazines. Throughout are scraps of an intergalactic queer utopia called Galaxia, including a script for a “space-pig ballet” to be performed at Paris Pride starring Guillaume’s alter-ego Miss Psyggy.

It’s outrageous. It shouldn’t hang together. But Dustan has masterful narrative control over the chaos that he summons, producing a devastating and liberating ode to freedom and love. It’s an intense experience, to receive creative force like this, like being hit by the sun, or a surprise cumshot to the face. His stream-of-consciousness regularly produces moments of tweaked-out poetic wonder:

I want sex to be a meditation. Like Bach, ideally. Marriage, marriage, marriage. I’m afraid. There’s a heatwave outside.

Or street wisdom:

Be thoughtful with your dealer … just because he makes you pay for the happiness that you feel entitled to all the time isn’t a reason to hate him. Same goes for the ones you love.

Or lessons on kinship that wouldn’t be out of place on Troye Sivan’s most-recent album:

You’re doing your thing and it’s good and I’m doing my thing and it’s good, and if we can have some moments together like the ones we’ve had already it’s perfect.

Or incredible tenderness:

Two days after he left I found the shiny prints left by his hands on the dirty railing. I put. My hands. In his.

A passage that takes place during Paris Pride astonishingly evokes the celebration in all its heat, haze and pulse. And like pride, partying slides into protest, for Nicolas Pages is also at war, and Dustan enlists everything in his arsenal in the pursuit of liberation. He rails against sex-hating queer conservatism, the voices of assimilation that blame the pandemic on “the men who were fucking, in backrooms, too often, without using condoms often enough”. This is an ode to bareback sex; there’s a “crisis of anal sexuality” after all! “Sexuality which excludes penetration,” Dustan writes, “is incomplete sexuality”, it’s the “sexuality of a freaked-out teenager”. Sure, it’s distasteful, and, perversely, rather authoritarian (so is his proud proclamation that he’s a eugenicist, although “not to disability” but to “small dicks”). But the distaste is surely part of the point, a shameless flaunting and spitting-in-the-face that must have been really quite out there in the late-’90s — still is, really — and it was only two years earlier that the advent of triple combination therapy had made living with HIV possible. “Perhaps I didn’t have to die with him?” Dustan writes, piercing the narrative with what is really at stake. Nicolas Pages is the work of throwing off shame in real time.

Gay rating: well…