In Marie NDiaye’s latest, an attorney struggles with the case of a mother accused of infanticide.
She calls herself a “near-perfect mother”; to her husband, she is a “peerless mother.” Yet one day, Marlyne Principaux drowns her three children in the bath before arranging their bodies in her bed. This is the horror story that underpins Marie NDiaye’s new novel, Vengeance Is Mine. But as shocking as these details are, NDiaye pivots from them to focus instead on a more oblique drama involving the lawyer enlisted to defend the accused woman. When Gilles Principaux, Marlyne’s husband, walks into the office of the attorney Maître Susane, a strange coincidence occurs: She immediately recognizes the bereaved man. He is the teenage boy, now middle-aged, whom she met only once in her childhood under mysterious circumstances that she strains to fully remember but who nevertheless shaped the entirety of her life to come.
The question of what took place in the boy’s bedroom that day during their long-ago childhood haunts NDiaye’s book. Maître Susane’s reaction to meeting Principaux puzzles her: “Why, convinced that after thirty-two years she was seeing someone who had enraptured her, did she feel as if her life were in danger?” She recognizes him as “the teenager she’d fallen in love with for all time,” someone who spurred her to ambition. But her immediate and instinctive fear leads her to the novel’s central question: “Who, to her, was Gilles Principaux?”
The novels of the French Senegalese NDiaye are at once dense and capacious; the work of her longtime English-language translator Jordan Stump powerfully conveys the mesmeric quality of her prose. The stories she tells are studded with events from the past that memory can neither access nor mold into narrative, as in the case of Maître Susane’s attempts to understand her relationship to Gilles Principaux. This failure might be NDiaye’s great theme: She is preoccupied by experience that cannot be processed, that resists explanation and remains obscured. The conventional tools of the novelist—character motivation, identity—are only ever partially shown in her work.
NDiaye is rarely interested in resolution and recuperation in the conventional sense. Instead, she traces the repercussions of denial and repression, the costs of maneuvering around something that has been cordoned off in the mind: an event, a relationship, a class position or racial identity. Few can write abstraction with such precision, so that what is hidden from the self is more telling and more powerful than what is revealed.
Vengeance Is Mine circles some of the same territory as the excellent recent film Saint Omer, written by NDiaye and the director Alice Diop. Many plot elements repeat: the infanticide trial of a young woman whose lack of remorse is both troubling and absolute, a female observer who is more and more implicated in the unfolding narrative, an illustration of the lacerating pressure of emigration. But whereas Saint Omer uses the setting and narrative structure of the courtroom—with testimonies and cross-examinations framed to emphasize its institutional power—Vengeance Is Mine is more internal, so that the courtroom is staged inside the mind of Maître Susane.
The language of the law is everywhere in Maître Susane’s thoughts. She is almost always referred to by her formal title; her conversations with Gilles and Marlyne are presented in near–transcript form, replete with verbal tics and repetitions. Most significantly, Maître Susane turns the language of the law toward the purpose of interrogating and controlling her own behavior. Nowhere is this self-examination more pronounced or more explosive than in Maître Susane’s relationship with Sharon, her cleaner and an undocumented Mauritian immigrant for whom she has eagerly offered to do pro bono work: “Sometimes she hated Sharon, who, it seemed, had privately put Maître Susane on trial, had found her guilty, and had pronounced a harsh sentence without the accused having the slightest idea of the wrong she had done.” Sharon cooks, cleans, and cares for Maître Susane. Her behavior is in every way exemplary, and yet it is, to Maître Susane, insufficient.
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The question of what exactly Maître Susane wants from Sharon is among the prickliest in the novel. Significantly, Maître Susane encountered the boy who may or may not have been Gilles Principaux while her mother was performing domestic work in the home of his wealthy family. Her preoccupation with Sharon and her children seems rooted in this uncanny parallel and uncomfortable inversion. In the aftermath of that childhood event—the details of which are never fully revealed but which possibly indicate something untoward, even criminal—Maître Susane is newly determined to climb out of her parents’ social class; if she doesn’t attain the true material wealth of the bourgeoisie, she nevertheless finds herself the employer rather than the employed.
NDiaye often places her characters in positions of apparent authority—teachers, as in My Heart Hemmed In, or, in this case, a lawyer. They enjoy an elevated social status, from which they also claim a moral high ground. In particular, they take pride in lives of apparent modesty and rectitude. Early on, NDiaye writes: “Maître Susane found a certain vain delight in convincing her friends that she had no interest in owning a high-status vehicle, that she was perfectly happy driving a battered twenty-year-old Twingo, that she was proud to display her indifference to such conventional notions of social standing.” But almost immediately after, she admits that this indifference is “pure fantasy. She yearned to be rich enough to buy a big, beautiful, sumptuous car.”
Pettiness and contradiction are central to Maître Susane’s character. She is preoccupied by how her relationship with Sharon demonstrates her goodness, although what it mostly demonstrates is how keenly she exercises her power. At least part of her unruly attraction to Sharon lies in the fact that she holds the cleaner’s fate in her hands: “I treat you with the greatest respect and see to your case out of the goodness of my heart … Does it never occur to you, Sharon, that I could have refused to take your case without payment, which would have left you helpless and alone …?”
Institutions—judicial, educational, carceral, familial—abound in NDiaye’s work, and she is exceptionally good at conveying how they shape and influence the individuals who both exercise their authority and are subjected to them. We see how they allow certain individuals to fully inhabit the obscenity of their own power. Tellingly, Maître Susane longs for Sharon to feel “hope, the result of an immaculate, unspoken fusion of fear and trust.” That she herself might be the source of that fear is the point.
The considerable apparatus of her official position does not, however, grant her certainty: Doubt, a painful awareness of her own subjectivity, continually seeps in. When she meets Marlyne, her thoughts grow unsettled even before she enters the room: “Was there, in this little room, a grieving soul, a guilty heart? How to know? … But how cold her eyes were! Or tired, worried, and that made them seem cold? How to know?” That uncertainty leads to a moment of profound disassociation: “She saw her arm reaching out toward Marlyne … She forced herself to raise her arm, she thought she had. Once again she saw herself embracing Marlyne, patting her back as, even formally, even with disgust, any lawyer would do with her client. But she couldn’t move, her arms hung straight and stiff at her sides.”
NDiaye’s work is notable for the way it fuses precise social observation with a deeply psychological, even hallucinatory register. Under pressure, characters are haunted by apparitions, afflicted by mysterious wounds. For Maître Susane, much like the once-beloved school teachers in My Heart Hemmed In who find their community suddenly turning against them, that pressure springs from the gap between the authority of the institution, and the uncertain motives and capacities of the individual who represents that institution.
As Maître Susane is racked by her obsessive desire to control Sharon and her doubt about the identity of Gilles Principaux, she is newly struck by the insufficiencies of “society’s justice,” how the vortex of emotion she experiences cannot possibly be fathomed, let alone processed through the judicial system of which she is part. The titular vengeance flares into being as a repressed longing for “a justice far higher than society’s justice, with its doubts, its delays, and also her waking self’s justice, which, doubting, delaying, made her forget any thought of punishing the boy who might have been named Gilles Principaux.”
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The ability to control her emotions, to submit them to the mechanisms of justice, is a point of pride to Maître Susane. At the start of the novel, empathy is a professional tool of which Maître Susane is proud. It allows her to occupy the mind of her client and to perform her work as a defense lawyer: “Maître Susane had seen only the summary of the events, the police’s discovery of the crime, the account of Marlyne’s first words. All the rest she was inventing, presuming, but, she would discover later, with what astonishing clairvoyance! In spite of her deep dislike, even her repulsion for Marlyne Principaux!”
But her powers of empathy are intermittent, and soon grow so uncontrolled that they tear at Maître Susane’s reality, as when the voice of Marlyne’s murdered child penetrates her mind: “Her right eye was on fire—oh Mother, save me! She also thought: I’m drowning, I’m sinking into hard, dirty water, why don’t you save me, why am I having to fight you.” Far from a professional asset of any kind, empathy morphs into horror.
If Vengeance Is Mine concludes without a trial in the traditional sense, Maître Susane’s final words mimic a closing argument of sorts. Her monologue returns to the site of the infanticide and centers on a single metaphor describing a house of horror: “That complicitous house, the house that sees all and never tells, the house that loves no one but prefers to ally itself with whoever has the most power within its walls … Yes, Mesdames and Messieurs of the Jury, the house confesses, the house that collaborates in the crime, it confesses….”
Rather than focusing on the guilt of Marlyne or Gilles Principaux, NDiaye seems to expand the scope of culpability. The house acts as a metaphor for a consenting society, one that observes but does not witness, one that always aligns itself with power. In the closing lines of the novel, NDiaye returns to Gilles. The question posed at the opening of the novel remains unanswered: “Who is he, then? We think we know now, but still we wonder: Could I be mistaken?” Primarily written in close third-person perspective, the book here makes a slippery, sinuous movement in and out of first person plural, as the reader is drawn into NDiaye’s circle of doubt, a terrain without the comfort of resolution.
