My Manservant and Me

Starred review from August 15, 2022
The late novelist and AIDS provocateur-activist Guibert (To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life) offers an exquisite narrative of submissive seduction, sadistic subjugation, and psychological manipulation involving an elderly playwright and his young caregiver. Guibert (1955–1991) sets the novel in 2036 and subtly unravels the men’s seesawing, often violent, kinky bonds. Hired to handle all the affairs of the “cynical dandy,” including a “colossal fortune” and the administration of morphine injections, 20-year-old Jim, a former child actor, usurps control of his master’s wardrobe, determines television viewing habits, and alters Regency-era furniture in the main bedroom of their Rue de Varenne mansion. Funds are frittered away on a Christmas sex holiday in Bangkok. Sir, as the 80-year-old playwright is known, meanwhile subsists on microwave meals, beer, and aquavit, and feels uneasy with his complicity in the “structure of servitude”—Budapesti tavern servers, Moroccan bellhops, La Coupole waiters, Jim—and asks himself, “Does this mean I like to enslave others?” Guibert’s unflinching descriptions and unfettered prose put him in a prominent place on the gay fiction continuum, somewhere between J.R. Ackerley and Garth Greenwell. Thanks to Zuckerman’s sumptuous translation, Anglophone readers can enjoy this captivating firecracker.

Starred review from August 15, 2022
"I never imagined that my manservant might like me": So begins the late French writer Guibert's darkly humorous short novel. The narrator is an ailing octogenarian, a man of means cushioned by his great-grandfather's "colossal fortune." In his youth he attempted to forge a career as a playwright, but his efforts never yielded "a true work of art." "Maybe someday I'll make something that will hold up if I'm able to simply describe the relationship binding me to my manservant," he says ruefully. His first-person chronicle of their turbulent relationship, furtively scrawled in a notebook in his manservant's absence, furnishes this book with its narrative. The manservant, Jim, is a "lazy young man," a luckless actor who's struggled to find success after a leading role in a serviceable film. And so he insinuates himself into a drama of Sade-an proportions. Cast opposite the narrator, he plays his role with a frightening, self-abnegating obsession to the lurid, bitter end. In their battle of wills, the manservant wields a manipulative force unlike any the narrator could've imagined for the inchoate characters that passed through his plays. He refuses the subservience prescribed by his title, usurping his master's life with a slew of deranged tactics: He bullies his staff, commandeers his finances, siphons off his wealth. "My manservant wants to take care of everything himself," says the narrator flatly. Jim's contempt for his master grows increasingly explicit, even violent, as the novel progresses. The narrator records this humiliation with sobering lucidity: "He never looks at my emaciated body, it's as if I don't have one, his eyes might pass over it but they never land on anything, they slide right past, like an ectoplasm." Yet nothing can displace their need for each other; their debasing codependency makes them appear "as if we were a single person now doubled." It's material well suited for a Fassbinder film. The novel was published in France in 1991, the year Guibert died of AIDS. His final years were marked by a bleak isolation akin to the one that engulfs the narrator. The narrator is, in James Schuyler's phrase, a "victim of the other side of love." And as his manservant reminds him, "Creatures need love, too, Sir." Guibert is the consummate poet of obsession: the way it unravels the self, and gives it substance, too.

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