In 1985, a slender novel called La Salle de Bain became an international bestseller. It was the first book written by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (b. 1957), whose only claim to fame until then had been winning the 1973 International Junior Scrabble championship. Something of a game itself, The Bathroom amused and perplexed readers with its playful eccentricity: The paragraphs are numbered, and the main character meditates on existence while sitting in a bathtub.
    The next year, Monsieur arrived. More traditionally told yet equally puzzling in a tongue-in-cheek way, it relates the amorous and professional inaction of an anonymous Fiat executive who displays “a listless drive” in all his activities—except ping-pong. “Monsieur,” as a non-hero, is a contemporary Everyman “without qualities,” as Robert Musil put it in the title of his magnum opus from the 1930s.
    Musil has long been an inspiration for Toussaint, who also claims to have been influenced by Pascal, Gombrowicz, Sartre and Camus, as well as by various writers associated with the French New Novel. His light touch and thematic légèreté de l’être may contrast with the manner and method of these heavyweights, but philosophical perspectives are constantly opened up by the author’s blend of punning, precise observation and cool detachment.
    L’Appareil-Photo (1989) and La Réticence (1991) are cases in point. The narrator of the former is again a sort of “Monsieur.” This time, he decides to take driving lessons. He enters a driving school but then spends his time talking to the young woman pro-prietor, a placid divorcée named Pascale Polougaïevski. Significantly, the narrator fails to get his identity photos and documents in order for his enrollment. Examining contemporary man’s lack of identity is one of Toussaint’s consistent narrative ploys.
    A tepid love slowly buds between the odd pair. Sometimes Pascale closes the driving school for a few hours, and the couple heads off on errands. Once, after being picked up by Pascale’s father in his car, the threesome attempts to turn in an empty bottle of butane gas for a new one in a shopping center service station. They end up leaving the car to be repaired, walking for miles and circumventing an artificial lake before getting home. Yet Pascale and the narrator take such detours in stride. They eventually spend a weekend in London, but what would have been a torrid honeymoon in most love stories here turns out almost inconclusively.
    In Toussaint, everything depends on this “almost.” Minor breaks in routine become moving because human action per se is depicted as fragile, ephemeral, absurd. In L’Appareil-Photo, the narrator finds a forgotten camera in the cafeteria of the ferryboat that is taking him and Pascale back to France. He desires “to take one single photo, something like a portrait, a self-portrait perhaps, but without me and in fact without anyone, simply a presence, at once whole and naked, painful and simple, without a background and almost without light.”
    Toussaint’s deft descriptions of “surfaces”—cityscapes, clothes, human bodies or everyday objects—are never without troubling depths. La Réticence builds to a study of paranoia. In this take on the French detective novel, the main character arrives with his baby son in a seaside village called “Sasuelo,” presumably located in Corsica (where Toussaint has lived) or another Mediterranean island. He spots a bad omen: A dead cat is floating in the water of the port.
    This initial vision induces a growing sense of being watched, notably by a writer called Biaggi whom he had wished to see during his stay but has not yet contacted. The “reticence” of the title tells all. Toussaint’s stories are replete with ellipses, understatements and suppressed clarifications, even as his narrators keep their hands in their pockets (a recurrent image) and would rather gaze at stars from rooftops than take initiatives. Yet for all their hesitation and gentle aloofness, these reticent Messieurs inevitably make a few harmless bizarre gestures, then commit one or two rash, less harmless acts. Like smooth continuous surfaces on which a number of unpredictable eruptions occur, Toussaint’s plots offer a literary interpretation of mathematical chaos theory.
    A fragmented Cartesianism is also at play, whereby the “I think” of the axiom is established but not the conclusion “therefore I am.” In La Réticence, the narrator’s self-doubting results in a disturbing final twist: His paranoid visions seem to have been figments of his imagination, and Biaggi a sort of alter ego. This is not the only place in Toussaint’s fiction where one writer seems to be watching another writer who is writing the book at hand.
    Long neglected in the United States (but hardly elsewhere), Toussaint’s latest works are now appearing in translation. Dalkey Archive has brought out a version of his 1997 novel, Television. Besides its jocular and enigmatic storytelling, the novel incisively dissects the role of television in contemporary lives. Interestingly, the narrator is a somewhat more substantial reincarnation of “Monsieur.” Here, he is an art historian, albeit more professional student than professor. The man’s pregnant wife and son have left for a summer vacation in Italy while he has remained in Berlin on a grant, ostensibly to write a book about the relationship between Charles V and the Venetian artist Titian.
    In French, Titian is usually called Titien or Le Titien, but there are other variants, so many that the narrator is perplexed by a “thorny little question, which name to use in [his] study, Titien, le Titien, Vecelli, Vecellio, Tiziano Vecellio, Titien Vecelli or Titien Vecellio?” Faced with this dilemma, he escapes to swimming pools for “work sessions.” He has also been pondering his disquisition by following the Tour de France bicycle race on television. But then he abruptly decides to stop watching television forever. After keeping this resolution for a while, he suddenly realizes that Tiziano Vecellio’s initials are “T.V.”
    Television is funny and strangely haunting. It revolves around the narrator’s struggle to cure his addiction to television, his inability to write his book and—funniest of all—his failure to carry out his one daily responsibility, that of watering the plants in his neighbors’ apartment. Before he neglects (for weeks) to fulfill this chore, he admires a rubber plant, noting its “impassible sadness, Sphinx-like quality, calm, detachment and fundamental indifference to the world.” He of course describes himself in the process. When his plant-loving neighbors unexpectedly return home, a Chaplin-esque episode ensues, involving a locked bathroom door. If this and other slapstick scenes represent climaxes, there is no catharsis in the otherwise imperturbable storyline. In Toussaint, what should have been comic relief does not relieve; a diffuse existential, even metaphysical, tension always persists.
    Television accompanies a New Press translation of Toussaint’s sixth novel, Faire l’amour (2002). Making Love (as it is called) and Fuir (2005), his seventh (untranslated) novel, form a diptych that explores the theme of amorous separation. Set mostly in Japan and China, the books are narrated by still another Monsieur who introduces himself as the companion of Marie de Montalte, a world-famous conceptual artist and haute couture designer.
    In Fuir, the ever-obliging narrator gets hooked into a half-ludicrous, half-perilous imbroglio with Zhang Xiangzhi, an unfathomable Chinese business associate of Marie’s. Wild chase scenes involve a motorcycle and the alluring Li Qi, who is Zhang Xiangzhi’s business partner, paramour or secretary: Her identity is mysterious as well. But beyond the farce of this casse-tête chinois (as the French term brain-teasers), the particular subtlety of both novels is Toussaint’s focus on the narrator and Marie as their love begins to crumble.
    Toussaint shrewdly explores the phenomenology of falling out of love. There is more explicit sex in the diptych than in Toussaint’s previous novels, but the acts retain only the memory of altruism and tenderness. The abstract, ontological vestiges for which the author has always searched—those traces of improbable “presence” on darkened mirrors—have become fleeting biological sensations inside the harried bodies of solitary individuals.

Il y avait d’ailleurs une sorte de pudeur générale, réservée et coupable, avais-je déjà souvent remarqué, à devoir évoquer les relations que chacun d’entre nous entretenait avec la télévision, chacun ne le faisant qu’à contrecœur, comme s’il s’agissait d’évoquer quelque maladie grave qui, loin de le toucher indirectement, l’eût concerné au plus près. Chacun, en effet, s’il pouvait difficilement nier qu’il en fût personnellement atteint, tâchait au moins d’en relativiser les conséquences, en insistant de préférence sur les quelques moments de répit que leur laissait encore la maladie, les quelques périodes de rémission, encore nombreuses, où ils n’en souffraient pas trop, où ses effets semblaient pouvoir être oubliés et où ils vivaient une vie normale, ces quelques soirs par semaine où ils sortaient encore en ville pour aller au théâtre ou au concert, ces longs après-midi dominicaux passés simplement à lire à la maison.