The COVID pandemic messed with a lot of people. Their jobs gone, their friends under lockdown, and so many people with so much free time and no real clue on how to occupy it. Its effects continue to ripple through politics, the economy, relationships and the lack thereof. One assumes the use of medicines designed to temper individual’s traumas and disconnect are making plenty of profit for the owners of their patents. One also assumes the lid is going to blow one of these days. Maybe when the meds no longer work as advertised or maybe just some random day when everything reaches a critical mass. Meanwhile, life goes on. And on.
Virginie Despentes is a French author. A runaway, sex worker, punk rocker and iconoclast, she has written several books, one of which (Baise-moi) was turned into a film and was temporarily banned in France. Another, titled King Kong Theory, expanded and simultaneously trashed conventional understandings of feminism. It is one of the better feminist tracts to be published since Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto. Like that text, it is also one of the most outrageous and inflammatory feminist texts to be published in the last sixty years. That’s a good thing.
Perhaps ironically, her newest novel, titled Dear Dickhead, features a protagonist accused of sexual harassment and stalking his assistant. This protagonist, who is a popular crime novelist, is called out by his victim during the period of the so-called #Metoo movement. The victim conducts her campaign on a personal blog that functions as a journal 
wherein she describes her experiences, the mental health crisis the harassment caused and her desire to destroy the man who victimized her. The result, as it is played out in the novel’s pages, is not pretty. It is, however, vivid, sometimes humorous, painful and problematic. It is, as they used to say, a battle of the sexes. Only this time, we’re playing by 2020 rules. The house formerly dominated by the male of the species doesn’t always have the odds in its favor. Believe me, that too is a good thing.
The dickhead in the title is the novelist Oscar B. The word itself refers to the greeting in an email he received from a famous but aging French film actress. Her name is Rebecca. In a drunken and obnoxious public comment on Instagram, Oscar B. remarks on Rebecca’s fading looks. Her response begins with the salutation, Dear Dickhead. What follows is a book long series of exchanges between Oscar B., and Rebecca. It is a conversation that ultimately includes Oscar B.’s sister (who was childhood friends with Rebecca), his ex-wife, his daughter and the recipient of his incessant, aggressive and unwanted advances, Zoé Katana. Despite the difficulty of using email exchanges as the entire text when writing fiction, Despentes has managed to do so quite skillfully.
Behind it all and informing it all is the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying public health measures people around the world were convinced and coerced into adapting. While none of the characters seem to have much trouble finding places they can isolate themselves—after all none of them are living on the street—the reality of the lockdown affects each in their own way. While no novel that features the pandemic and lockdown in its story has come close to describing the totality of that moment in time, Dear Dickhead does a fairly decent job of incorporating it into its tale.
This is not a pretty tale. Sexual harassment is an ugly and real byproduct of the patriarchy, intensified by the hierarchies of capital and corporatist bureaucracies. Mental health crises are another such phenomenon. The expectations of a culture that idolizes good looks and devours youth are cruel to those who lose both after depending on them for as long as they can. No, this is ultimately something of an ugly tale. There are hints of redemption that are then tempered by the reality of habit and reputation. Nonetheless, it is an excellent read.
The writing in Dear Dickhead is electric, explosive mad, beautiful, and exhilarating. Nothing is sacred, life is rude and ugly and all is potentially beautiful. The world Despentes explored, ravaged and revealed in her non-fiction text King Kong Theory is now a clever, witty and riotous novel. Its location in the time of the COVID pandemic merely heightens that characterization and the contradictions of our contemporary spiral towards what looks more and more like a much greater madness.
