THE BARGAIN SHOPPER (The Confessions of a Soldier of Truth in the Age of Pandemic) by W.C. Latour is a feat of haughty, vicious rhetoric, the product of a lifetime of pent-up frustrations expelled from the body with all the subtlety of a ripe raspberry. Charles Rochambeau is – or rather, imagines himself to be – an aristocratic sort fallen on hard times. Living in a dingy, leaky apartment in upstate New York, he harbors an “anathema for technological rages”, is given to literary flights of fancy, and is as equally at home quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edgar Allan Poe as he is Yoda. In religious terms, he is a Pascalian wagerer, cleaving to that “perfect safety net” that allows those who struggle to reconcile science with faith to have their cake and eat it. In political terms, he has all of the conceits of a disaffected noble, for whom servants and stately houses count as “basic material comforts”, yet his blunderbuss attacks on today’s society and political system make targets out of more or less everybody. (Bernie Sanders gets a partial pass, for being “far less of a liar” than his contemporaries – hardly a ringing endorsement; while it is not hard to guess to whom Rochambeau is referring when he invokes the “illiterates of the Wharton School” that were his contemporaries.) To be clear: it is the world, and everyone in it, that our protagonist ranges himself against.
This is unsurprising. There is something deliciously ironic in depicting the descendant of a French well-to-do as a personal shopper, and Rochambeau never knowingly lets an opportunity pass without reminding his readers of the plebeian depths to which he has fallen, peppering the text with reminders that go back to his dropping out of private school, and before. The prose is a spiritual heir to Rabelais, who doubt would have approved of the ribald references to bodily functions celebrated on their own account, and the long, rangy descriptions that frequently arrive at their destination only via the longest possible route. As with any book where the style is the substance, there is at times a sense that the plot gets kicked into the long grass – readers are well into the middle third of the novel before there is any discernible development. To which Rochambeau would doubtless reply – as he so often does – “Play Lotto”. The joy in a novel of this sort is not the journey, but the friends one lambasts along the way. W. C. Latour’s antihero is opinionated, a snob, and in his way, just as vicious as the feral rich to whom he panders – but he is never boring.
W. C. Latour’s THE BARGAIN SHOPPER (The Confessions of a Soldier of Truth in the Age of Pandemic) is a curious, startling read, all artifice and loucheness, and all in the service of some biting satire of today’s society.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader