Spotlight on … Denis Belloc Neons (1987)

‘“I kneaded mud and I made gold”: Belloc could borrow this verse from Baudelaire, which has become a cliché, to make it the subtitle of his Neons. Story of a self-discovery through obscene misery (the spectacle of a father dying after a boxing match, the mother remarried to a slugger, the discovery of her homosexuality in a pissotière, prostitution between Pigalle and Barbès where one sells for fifty bucks, the orgy in the Bois, the recovery house, the jail, the smashes …) and a cruel and implacable language, Néons leads the reader in his drift, refusing any form of wretchedness and regret … but by looking, convulsively, how to make a saving black humor emerge from the abrasions: ” I hear words:” morbid “,” depraved “and then” poor guy “. […]I look for the word in my dictionary: MORBIDE: relating to the disease: morbid state. Which denotes a sickly, depraved imbalance: morbid imagination. DEPRAVED: Spoiled: depraved taste. Perverted, debauched. For “poor guy”, I’m not looking. I know. “From this strange biographical tale which seeks to recreate, in a pulp novel way , a life whose softness and light have been scraped alive, we retain the sarcastic smile of Denis Belloc, which transforms lust into revealing a certain social truth (“I’m fifteen, I get nothing out of dialectical materialism and I don’t give a fuck about class struggle. I don’t like mine enough.”) And manages to make one feel, under the layers of merciless anecdotes given without coating, all the innocence of a being uninhibited, wild, and of a deafening honesty.’ — Julie Proust Tanguy

‘This is an old story, but one that literature has ignored until relatively recently–a universal story that Denis Belloc sets in France in the 1960s. A poor boy whose mother neglects him and whose stepfather beats him finds excitement and a kind of love in “tearooms,” or public restrooms. Uneducated but good-looking, he is absorbed into a homosexual underworld of prostitution, petty crime and unstable relationships with men a little older and a little better off than he.

‘The protagonist, named Denis like the author, “lives the absence” of his father, a boxer who was killed in a carnival sideshow. He has a vacancy in him that nothing seems to fill. He drifts through blue-collar jobs, prison and intervals as a kept man, periodically infected by syphilis, impulsively drawn to violence, oblivion and flight. The novel’s minimalist style fits the subject. Belloc presents Denis’ life in terse, detached scenes, as brutally clear but as fleeting as the neon lights that flow over him as he guns a stolen motorcycle through the streets of Paris.

‘Denis hardly has a chance. At 20, an ex-con with a drinking problem, his marketability waning–“(my body is) all I have to give”–he seems to have little to look forward to. He does have an interest in painting–his mother’s one positive legacy. And that literary phrase “living the absence” suggests that he may be acquiring an artist’s ability to give form to his pain. Belloc leaves the question open; his main purpose is to show how deforming pain can be.’ — Michael Harris, The Los Angeles Times

‘Néons tells the story of a guy who was massacred before he wrote it down, as though he vomited it and thus exorcised him: a father who died too early (“He was twenty-five years old. me one and a half. And what he did to me that evening in July 1951, I couldn’t forgive him. I thought: […] You are an absent bastard and I hate you.”), a bumping stepfather, a mother overwhelmed by events, the early discovery of raw and sacrificial sexuality (“And I put my satchel in the urinal on going to school, coming back from school, I wank and wank too, sometimes they suck my cock but I don’t want to suck.”), Petty crime, the reform house, the galley, the sidewalk, the descent to the lowest in extreme loneliness and self-loathing (“Lower your pants, spread your legs. Offer your mouth and buttocks. Whirlwind of spunk and shit, filth to be forgotten.”), Death stretching out its arms but the mother coming back, painting and this book to finally get out of it, maybe (and in fact not … but the rest is written in the later novels). We will have understood that reading this one is quite trying: because the truth is never made up there, because its language is raw (even though it is often sublime), because at the end of all that (which leaves to hope) seen how it started there is nothing necessarily. Not love anyway. So nothing but this Neons which is already a lot because of those rare books brought back from Hell which leave the reader (which they spit out at the end dumbfounded and shaken) a taste of ashes in the mouth and the mind upset to come to attend nothing less than ‘a miracle: that of the blossoming, in the mire and the wetness, of a song from the depths all of lack and excess, therefore of great violence… but of pure beauty.’ — Jean-Marc Flapp

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Further

Denis Belloc @ Wikipedia
‘Neons’ @ goodreads
‘Neons’ reviewed @ Kirkus
‘Neons’ reviewed @ Publishers Weekly
Denis Belloc: Écrivain sans domicile fixe
Contribution subjective à une mémoire …
Néons, un livre atypique
BELLOC Denis | Néons @ Dissonances
Buy ‘Neons’

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Extras

Denis Belloc “Anti-portrait chinois” de Thierry Ardisson

Bernard PIVOT reçoit Denis BELLOC pour son premier livre “Néons”

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Press

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Book

Denis Belloc Neons
Godine

‘In this brilliant tale of violent sexuality, set forth in stark, hypnotic prose, Denis Belloc presents a straightforward narrative of the homosexual underworld in 1960s Paris. As a young child, Denis (autobiographical parallels are intentional) witnesses his father’s death in a sideshow boxing match and is left with nothing but faded photographs. Numbed by his mother’s neglect and her new husband’s abusive treatment, he turns to Paris’s teeming street life and to the sordid corners of the city’s “tearooms” (public restrooms). He is absorbed quickly into a world of physical and emotional prostitution, and finds temporary stability only with a few lovers and friends. Belloc’s detached style is devoid of self-pity, and creates a savage, involving tension. Blasphemous, unrelenting, uninhibited, this novel will leave no one indifferent.’ — Godine

‘This explosive and magnificent book speaks the truth, always.’
—Marguerite Duras

‘There’s much brilliance in Neons. Belloc’s story of homosexual underlife in Paris may be ages old, but he has sculpted it into a sequence of amazing musical fragments whose cacophonous honesty is perfectly matched to a prose both offhanded and capable of unnerving emotional feats.’
—Dennis Cooper

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Excerpts

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thank you! Thank you too for your love’s great intentions for my health. It hasn’t quite worked yet, but it’s the fantasy that counts, as I know all too well. Nice ashtray picks. Love like the sound of coins hitting the floor when some rich kid is grabbed by the ankles, turned upside down, and shaken, G. ** Ashhh, Nice name. Hi. Yeah, I’m still sick, grr, and I didn’t make it to Salon du Chocolat for that reason, so drat. ‘The Crucible’, that’s an interesting Halloween watch. Every time I lend someone a book, I just go ahead and write it off. Thank you marking your friend’s graduation so nefariously. I would want most of the ashtrays in my house, especially the ones that are worth a lot of money, although in that case rather briefly. And maybe not that poor human ashtray, although I guess she likes it, although it doesn’t really look like she does. ** _Black_Acrylic, It did make for a blissful short time. Maybe I need to just stream that episode 24/7 from here on out. Nostalgia for smoking cigarettes is a rosy lie of a longing, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. Great! Best luck with the submission! ** Bzzt, Hi, man, so nice to see you! Wednesday … tomorrow! Yes, please hook us up. Sure, I’d love to hang while you’re here. Just hit me up when you know your schedule, etc., and we’l sort it. Nice! I haven’t read Colette since I was pretty young, and I thought her stuff was kind of so-so at the time, but maybe it ages well or something. It did seem like one of those things where if you don’t read and like it when you’re in your teens you never will. But I could be totally wrong. Look forward to seeing you! ** David, Hi. The name Dennis Nilsen rings a bell, ha ha. I know a guy whose father was one of Nilsen’s victims. I don’t know what one line only on the covid test means, but congrats! ** Bill, Hi. I do know that Caja piece, and why it slipped my mind when making that post is a giant mystery. Yeah, I still feel shitty, but, yeah, hopefully not for long, and thank you. A bit cruel? Ha ha. ** T, Oh, no, you’re one of those annoying people. Ha ha. Don’t start buying packs though. Better to be very slightly annoying than be a full-fledged smoker. Like me. I didn’t make it to Salon du Chocolat due to my feeling shitty, and it’s sad but not, you know, tragic or anything. I could use one of those masks at the moment. Maybe I can put some scotch tape on the edges of my face and fake it. I hope your today turns every staircase into an escalator and every sidewalk into a conveyer belt. xo. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. Thank you a lot, sir. Soup sounds really, really good. Split pea … oooh. I’ll see if I can find some. You good? Hope so. ** Steve Erickson, Thanks, Steve. If I was a multi-billionaire, I’d buy a failed mall and have it redesigned into a gigantic mansion. I would. I really think I would. ** Misanthrope, Well, I’m still sick, so watch your back. I would feel terrible if I had any part in preventing you from doing Cornstalkers. ** Okay. Today I’m spotlighting a really terrific novel that is very much an overlooked gem. It’s a novel that I definitely think could be of real interest to at least some of you who frequent this blog or my own books, but I’ve certainly been wrong before. Have a look. See you tomorrow.