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The Bathroom

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Jean-Philippe Toussaint

November 2008

Josh Maday

The nameless narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s debut novel, The Bathroom, takes up residence in his bathroom and refuses to leave, while others attend to him and try in vain to coax him from the bathtub, where he cultivates the “quietude of [his] abstract life.” The premise brings to mind Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, the 19th-Century Russian nobleman who does not get out of bed for the first 150 pages of the novel. However, while The Bathroom is no satire, neither does Toussaint weigh it down with seriousness.

The nameless narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s debut novel, The Bathroom, takes up residence in his bathroom and refuses to leave, while others attend to him and try in vain to coax him from the bathtub, where he cultivates the “quietude of [his] abstract life.” The premise brings to mind Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, the 19th-Century Russian nobleman who does not get out of bed for the first 150 pages of the novel. However, while The Bathroom is no satire, neither does Toussaint weigh it down with seriousness.

Toussaint’s man is sincerely content to lie in the tub, the “warm human voices” coming from the radio enough of a connection to a world which has little to offer that his bathtub and attendants cannot. Only an invitation from the Austrian embassy seems to make him consider leaving his ceramic paradise.

10. Seated on the edge of the bathtub, I was explaining to Edmondsson that perhaps it was not very healthy, at age twenty-seven going on twenty-nine, to live more or less shut up in a bathtub. I ought to take some risk, I said, looking down and stroking the enamel of the bathtub, the risk of compromising the quietude of my abstract life for . . . I did not finish my sentence.

11. The next day I left the bathroom.

Toussaint’s novel moves in new and interesting ways, countering the narrator’s quest for immobility. Readers who require a traditional story arc with predictable plot lines and a sweet spoon-fed ending may find this book a bit quiet and contemplative. However, read on its own terms, The Bathroom opens up. The elements accumulate and begin to interact.

In Part II, entitled “Hypotenuse,” the narrator leaves for Venice without telling anyone. Here he does little besides loaf in his hotel room, throwing darts, and wandering to the bar while housekeeping refreshes his room. His program toward total “immobility” is cemented: “My hands froze on the table and I tried with all my strength to hold this immobility, to keep it, but I realized that upon my body, too, movement was streaming.”

Developing a nasty case of “incipient sinusitis,” he is confined to his hotel room for most of Part III (titled “Paris” like Part I), until, near the end, he finally returns to his apartment, to his bathtub. The final pages repeat the first few pages: his lying in the bathtub, Edmondsson bursting in with the envelope from the Austrian embassy, and the two final sections are repetitions from earlier in the book, almost verbatim, but of course they now mean something different. Was it all “just a dream”? Was everything beginning again in a recursive loop? If so, does he (can he?) make a choice to go into the world once again, or simply return to his bathtub instead?

The text is broken up into numbered fragments in the manor of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. Pascal also contributed to the philosophy of mathematics with what is now called Pascal’s triangle, which also seems to receive a nod from Toussaint, titling Part II “Hypotenuse.” Each paragraph continues from the previous, but breaking and separating the text with numbered paragraphs indicates that each may stand as a disconnected moment in the narrator’s mind, a compartmentalized thought or experience, where each present moment seems to be its own entity, unrelated causally for the narrator to what came before and after. Or, maybe the numbers, even though they maintain sequence, are arbitrary. They are there, breaking the flow of the text, even though the sections continue a linear narrative, making the numbers almost redundant, as though the obsessive narrator cannot help himself from forcing the narrative flow with mathematical certainty despite his quest for total immobility.

Toussaint has certainly given the reader a wealth of elements to contemplate in a slim volume. However, while there is a lot to think about philosophically, The Bathroom is above all an entertaining novel. Fortunately, Dalkey Archive thinks so, too, and took the steps to make this interesting new French novel available in English.

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