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‘Suite’ was born of an invitation Pierre Senges received to contribute to an anthology on the future of the novel (Devenirs du roman, published by Inculte/Naïf in 2007) That impetus goes some way to expain the essay’s programmatic aspects: ‘Suite’ is an ars poetica, a droll demonstration of its author’s daringly agile imagination If one were looking for a prickly rejoinder to the calculating candor of autobiographical fictions, or a riposte to the purveyors of a narrowly conceived realism, these 4,500 words of ludic vitriol might do the trick in spades —J S   *   Prelude   The bookstore overrun by the charming singers: here they come, they are superb, they’ve crystal-clear eyes and faces chiseled by experience, twenty years old almost; they’re not glabrous, only a baby would be so naïve, they are not bearded, but rather endowed with the elegance of some Greek aristo-platonic ancestor, or with some elusive trait by which two old readers of Proudhon recognise one another — neither glabrous nor bearded, but in an intermediate state of charming singer, of beautiful abandon, disheveled hair, and virility, to which are added, if you can believe it, veritable pearls of sweat The face of the lover, perfect the morning after his exploits, rolling out of bed, wild and natural, still feeling the effects of his efforts, not more vain for that though, seeming to confer the status of exception upon the ordinariness of routine, but languid with a handsome, manly languor (we see there his abandonment to the forces of nature): the charming singer should appear to have been pulled from his bed at noon, and appear before his admirers in pyjamas, which grants him the right to take his breakfast in public, like the Sun King He is suave, he’s a crooner, a crooner without coffers but a crooner all the same, a tenor of songs that susurrate near the microwave since he is unable to project his voice to the other side of the proscenium; and since his couplets are of the intimate sort (stories of flings, of regrets following the fling, of regret’s end