Bad Eminence

Musician and screenwriter Greer (Everything Flows) delivers a zany and messy story of a literary translator hired by an infamous French author referred to as “Not Houellebecq.” Vanessa Salomon, 29, lives in a New York City apartment once inhabited by photographer Francesca Woodman, and carves out a life in contrast to her movie star twin sister, Angelique. Vanessa obsesses over Woodman’s 1981 suicide at age 22. She also assumes responsibility for the recent suicide of her lover Thomas, a poet who, like Woodman, jumped to his death. She travels to France to meet Not Houellebecq, whose work she despises, and learns he has yet to finish the book she is meant to translate. The situation presents a convenient opportunity for Vanessa to test her theory that the best translations are written before the original text, but before she gets very far, the “rapey” Not Houellebecq drugs her, and she wakes up back in her apartment in New York without knowing what happened. The prose is often overwrought and dilletantish, with Vanessa expounding on literature and sharing her pessimistic views, and the esoteric journal entries from Thomas add nothing. Still, an absurdist action-packed third act involving a rescue operation of Angelique in the Alps turns out to be fun, kind of like watching that old Bruce Willis caper Hudson Hawk. The author’s fans might dig it. (July)