Gérard Gavarry’s Hops

Once in a great while a novel comes along that pleases and astonishes not only by virtue of the story it tells, but also by virtue of its form, and the new possibilities that it suggests for the genre itself. Gérard Gavarry’s Hop là! un deux trois (2001) is just such a book, one of the richest and most innovative novels to appear in France in recent years. Set in the suburbs of Paris, it puts on stage figures seen only rarely in French fiction: supermarket employees, long-distance truck drivers, fatigued commuters, and young, supremely disaffected banlieusards. Clearly, one of the things that Gavarry is after in his project is to persuade his readers that the banlieue and its inhabitants deserve more attention than they have been accorded in fiction. And in that sense Hop là! is a deeply committed “social text,” invoking what François Maspero (speaking from the perspective of an “intra-muros” Parisian) called “ce monde qu’on a sous les yeux et qu’on ne voit pas: ce monde des frontières, qui, à chacun de nous, fait un peu peur” (18).1