In 2006, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then the Interior Minister of France, agreed to let the playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza follow him, as part of his inner circle, while he campaigned for the Presidency. The proposal came without any pretense on her part of servility or of discretion in how she would portray him. Reza is an adversarial writer even in her tender moments, which are infrequent, and she has a gift for derision which Flaubert might have admired. One has to wonder what Sarkozy was thinking. But he gamely countered with his own dare. “Even if you demolish me, you will elevate me,” he boasted to her at the outset. “I don’t think I did either,” Reza told me, in January, in Paris, “but I might have wounded his amour propre. The truth does that.”
“Dawn, Dusk or Night” was published in France shortly after Sarkozy’s victory, in 2007. (Their last interview and, Reza wrote, their only attempt at a real conversation took place at the Élysée Palace.) It created a sensation, selling some three hundred thousand copies, although reviewers could not agree what to make of it: it was “too close,” “too detached,” “cruel,” “savory,” “photoshopped prose,” “lucid,” “like pictures from a spy satellite,” “caustic,” “a literary curiosity,” and a “literary monument.” “Sometimes,” one commentator remarked, “the hunter is more interesting than the prey.”
Reza distilled her notes from an intermittent year on the campaign trail into a collage of fugitive impressions and vignettes, some poetic and penetrating, others a bit cavalier, and at least a few naïvely conceited. (Sarkozy and his then wife, Cécilia, attend one of Reza’s plays, and Reza reports that, on the plane to a rally, he recites from memory a short “essential” bit of monologue.) Sarkozy introduced Reza as a “genius” to Tony Blair, and invited her to sit in on his first meeting, in Washington, with the then junior senator from Illinois. The concentration of so much political talent and Presidential ambition in one room impressed her, but, on the whole, she found politics a bore—“a dumb job for smart people,” as a friend of hers puts it in the book. A journalist warns her that she is out of her depth. “Don’t do it, Yasmina,” he says. Politicians “are stronger than us.” But, she reflects defiantly, “To be threatened by someone’s strength, you have to be in competition with him. Or weakened by sentiment.”
“The Ballad of Yasmina and Nicolas,” as a headline referred to “Dawn, Dusk or Night,” does have a model in French letters: the private journals that courtiers of the eighteenth century wrote by candlelight to edify an unworldly child, or to amuse a paramour. Reza’s aphoristic style has some of the same elegance. (When the polls show Sarkozy in the lead, she observes, “To be the favorite: how disappointing for a lover of adversity.”) Beneath its disenchantment, it also has some of the same yearning for sincerity. As the title suggests, Reza, too, was hiding something from the glare of day. The book is dedicated to a man whom she calls G, and of whom she gives tantalizing but mysterious glimpses. One infers that he is an important politician, perhaps a rival to Sarkozy; that she is courting him with this bravura performance of lèse-majesté; and that he eludes and therefore compels her as Sarkozy does not. (After a speech that Sarkozy felt was particularly bold and clever, he asked Reza familiarly, “Ça t’a plu?” —“Were you pleased?” The presumption of the question—that she, “of all people,” would be pleased by his self-infatuated rhetoric—insults her.) Yet Sarkozy, she told me, not without admiration, also “understood better than anyone else what I had done.” In a way, she conceded, she had betrayed him. It wasn’t that she had exposed his vanities—he had signed on for the scrutiny. But he had once chided her, half-jokingly, “You’re not here to admire others!” And, without his knowledge, she had spent a uniquely privileged year in his company writing, as she put it, “a chronicle of love” whose true subject was another man. (G’s identity has aroused speculation but has never been revealed.) __
A talent for ingratitude is often a pre-requisite for great achievement. Few creative artists have the gall of Yasmina Reza, but few have her powers of invention. In the past two decades, she has produced three novels of literary distinction; three screenplays; a translation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” for Roman Polanski; two memoirs in the laconic style of the Sarkozy book; and seven works of theatre that have earned her a controversial celebrity. (Six of her plays have been translated for the English-speaking stage by Christopher Hampton.) On March 22nd, her latest play, “God of Carnage”—a comedy of manners, or, perhaps more accurately, a debacle of manners—opens on Broadway. “I always refuse to change the setting for foreign productions,” she said, “but in this case I made an exception. The characters work so plausibly as New Yorkers.” (They are two well-off couples who meet with civilized intentions to discuss their sons, eleven-year-old schoolmates. One boy has bashed the other’s teeth in.)
Reza made her début with “Conversations After a Funeral,” which won the Molière Award (France’s most prestigious drama prize) for Best Author in 1987, when she was twenty-eight. It was followed by “Winter Crossing,” in 1989, which also won a Molière. Her third play, “Art,” won two, in 1995, but they were perhaps the least noteworthy of its honors. “Art,” which describes an episode in the friendship of three men who come to blows over a minimalist painting and end up vandalizing it and the friendship, has been translated into more than thirty languages, and, according to Reza, no other contemporary play in the world is performed as often or as widely. (Gross receipts have been estimated at more than three hundred million dollars, making Reza one of the most successful contemporary dramatists in any language.) The London production, with Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Ken Stott, won a Laurence Olivier Award for Comedy, and ran for six years. (“The category surprised me,” Reza said dryly. “I thought I had written a tragedy.”) The New York production, in 1998, starring Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina, won a Tony for Best Play.
The argument among the friends, about the white-on-white canvas for which one of them has paid an exorbitant sum, is really a debate about the way that people value, or overvalue, the attributes, relations, and received ideas in which they invest their identity. But the play itself became a screen upon which beholders projected their view of Yasmina Reza. Few quibbled with her stagecraft or her dialogue. She has a mynah bird’s ear for the coded preening, casual profanity, and calculated self-deprecation by which her protagonists—upper-middle-class professionals, for the most part—dissemble their fragility. Some critics, however, perceived “Art” as the polemic of a closet philistine who was mocking modernism, if not modernity. Others dismissed Reza as a boulevard crowd-pleaser with art-house pretensions: “the queen of ‘big ideas, lite.’ ” The French were disdainful of her triumphs abroad, and Reza was scathing to me on the subject of “left-wing journalists in whose opinion success is right-wing.” To the degree that she will consent to define herself—and escaping definition is one of her central preoccupations—it is not only as a writer who doesn’t traffic in big ideas but as one with a profound antipathy toward intellectualizing. “I’m not cerebral,” she said. “I never theorize about human nature. My work is visceral and subjective. I’m interested in the banal, unguarded moments and the hairline fractures in a character that let the light through. Sarko has a fracture, that’s why I have a tenderness for him—his surface isn’t impermeable.” Reza, who is a first-generation French citizen—her parents were both Eastern European Jews—likes to consider herself an outsider to the cultural establishment. “I have never wanted to join a coterie. But my reserve and my ferocity are mistaken for arrogance by journalists, so I give them the strict minimum. If they sense that I don’t care about their opinions, they’re right.” (In part because she is so loath to be branded, Reza followed “Art” with “The Unexpected Man,” a small, beautifully nuanced study of character in which two strangers on a train—played, in New York, in 2000, by Alan Bates and Eileen Atkins—fantasize about each other without speaking until the end.)
“God of Carnage” was written on commission, in 2006, for the Berliner Ensemble, and directed by the legendary Jürgen Gosch. Reza herself directed the Paris production, which starred Isabelle Huppert. (Ralph Fiennes headlined the cast in London, last year.) The Broadway production, directed by Matthew Warchus, stars James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels, and Hope Davis as the two couples, one earthy, the other patrician-looking. The action takes place in a long, uninterrupted scene in the Cobble Hill living room of the victim’s parents (the earthy ones). A discussion of the boy’s dental work—implants will have to wait until his jaw matures—and of the penitence that his mother feels is appropriate are the first items on the agenda, but good will quickly evaporates. The ensuing fracas follows an arc that Reza has perfected: fraudulent politesse gives way to toxic cavilling that degenerates into a brawl in the course of which all bluffs are called. (Some of the comedy, which involves projectile vomiting and annoying phone calls, and some of the irony, which relates to Darfur and a hamster, are atypical for a satirist of Reza’s finesse.)
Actors love Reza’s work more reliably than drama critics do. She writes for an ensemble of equals—there are almost no minor roles—and the volatile mixture of wit and resentment in a tight structure ignites with a spark. She herself started out as an actress. After college, at Paris X Nanterre, where she studied sociology and theatre—“I was just really passing time”—Reza auditioned for the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art. She thought that she had given “a very original performance, but I didn’t get in, and the rejection left me with an enduring sense of injustice.” (Eight years later, she noted, “I was a judge.”) On the rebound, she enrolled at the International Theatre School Jacques Lecoq, where the training stresses movement, gesture, pantomime, and spatial awareness. Reza said, “Lecoq played to my forte—a physical language that you are born with or not. I think, write, and direct with my body. French actors trained at the Conservatory tend to work with less spontaneity. I had to liberate Isabelle Huppert from her classical education. I had to get her to use her body more capriciously.” (Huppert’s character in “God of Carnage” pins her husband to the sofa and pummels him like a Fury.) For a few years, when Reza was in her twenties, she did “all kinds of parts, from Sacha Guitry to Arrabal, and quite a few that were avant-garde—my physique is modern.” But she thought that she wasn’t beautiful enough, or beautiful in the right way, for the leading roles that she aspired to. (She is beautiful in an exotic way, small and waifish, with dark hair that frames sensuous features—the face of a houri.) “So I had to find something else,” she said. “Acting, finally, is a disastrous profession. You are at the mercy of others, and you spend your life waiting, which is intolerable to me. I am very impatient.” She has described time as a “curse,” “Hell,” and as an enemy “I can’t bow to.”
Reza did not have to wait long for fame; she was thirty-five when “Art” had its première. But the scope of her success brought her a notoriety that was, she said, “destabilizing, and even devastating. You can’t pretend to not give a damn, but you have to try to forget about it. In order to regain my balance, I turned down all the offers and invitations that poured in, and spent my time with real friends who don’t give a shit about my celebrity. I wrote ‘The Unexpected Man’ and ‘Hammer-klavier’ ”—a memoir of fragments in a terse, dreamy present tense. “And I went off to the seaside with my daughter”—Reza has two children—“for three weeks, where I wrote a key section of ‘Desolation,’ ” her first novel. “They satisfied the need to create something intimate, and to repossess myself. By then, I was forty, and I felt free again.”
“Desolation” is an eloquent howl at the grotesque fatuity of a tame life, and a work of exceptional virtuosity. In a novella-length monologue delivered with a murderous glee, Samuel Perlman, a retired clothier, addresses his absent son, a thirty-eight-year-old beachcomber whom, his wife tells him, he has “crushed.” When his daughter reports that her brother is, finally, “happy,” Perlman unleashes a diatribe about all the therapeutic clichés with which people who aspire to be civilized console themselves for having compromised their vital obsessions. Mellowness, tolerance, self-acceptance—they are, in his view, “the peace of dead souls.” As Perlman takes stock of his losses—of the few friends who nobly “embraced frivolity”; of the mistress who, despite being a “complete nothing,” had a genius for abandon; of the wife who charmed him until she began “neglecting futility”; of the children whose laughter had once been free and defiant—he recognizes that he, too, has been “tragically humanized.”
Reza’s fiction is the deep end of her talent—a reservoir of buoyant anguish and pessimism. The protagonist of “Adam Haberberg” (2003), her next novel, is an obscure writer sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes, feeling the first chill of mortality, who realizes that he can no longer bear to be Adam Haberberg. The central character in “Dans la Luge d’Arthur Schopenhauer” (2005), Ariel Chipman, is a suicidally depressed academic who has sacrificed real living to an idea of what his life should be. (The three other characters are his long-suffering wife, Nadine; an ex-colleague whom he despises; and a psychiatrist.) “Luge” was staged in 2006, with Reza playing Nadine. She tells the psychiatrist, “You’re going to say, but I don’t care, that I’m arrogant to think I’ve done well by keeping my distance from these so-called brainiacs who have ruled my husband’s life, for his whole life my husband has been crazy about these so-called brainiacs who desert him at the crucial moment . . . to a terrible solitude.” Reza was accused of sharing Nadine’s contempt for intellect (Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze are also mentioned in passing; the former, it is noted, strangled his wife, and the latter jumped out a window)—a version of the charge levelled at “Art.” But Reza told an interviewer, “There is nothing useless about philosophy. On the contrary, I would like philosophy to recover its original function: as an art of living.” Spinoza’s theory that “one should put aside hope, and concentrate on joy” is, she believes, admirable in principle, but all theory “has to be confronted by lived experience.” (If her work had a house philosopher, it would probably be Thomas Hobbes.)
I was introduced to Reza in New York, late in December, at a reading at the Strand Bookstore. “The first thing I noticed about you was your trousers,” she said. “I thought they were something that I might wear.” Reza, the connoisseur of frivolity, finds fashion interesting, knows what suits her (a trim little skirt, high heels), and makes it a uniform. Her literary persona has a whiff of machismo that is at odds with the intensely feminine woman, a bit uncertain despite her bravado, that she seems in person. There are not many women writers whose work, like Reza’s, is a theatre of cruelty—though it’s a festive cruelty, like the bullfight. “The actress is the female part of me, and as a female I am an idiot, archaic, a slave of instinct who can’t exercise her intelligence,” she says wryly. “I write as a man.” The archaic woman finds questions about her date of birth impertinent, but Reza will turn fifty on May 1st. I asked her if age hadn’t cured her of some of her idiocy, and she laughed. “The only wisdom I’ve acquired is how not to be too wise.”
Our conversation continued a couple of weeks later in Paris. I arrived on a mild, overcast Sunday in the middle of the couture shows, and the Rue Saint-Honoré was mobbed with Americans stimulating the French economy. Reza had invited me for tea, and to shake my jet lag I walked through the Tuileries, crossed the river, and meandered around Saint-Germain. Half the magazines at the news kiosks seemed to have a radiant Carla Bruni—Sarkozy’s new wife—on the cover. I thought about the passages on love in “Dawn, Dusk or Night.” Reza had marvelled at the inanity of a sentence in Sarkozy’s autobiography: “Today, Cécilia and I are back together for good, for real, no doubt, forever.” Another day, he had said, “Love is the only thing that counts.” Returning from a trip, he had confided, “I can only love a landscape if I’m in it with someone I love.” “A vain formula,” Reza wrote, “like all those in which he brandishes the banner of love.” At least once, though—at his most endearing—she lets him catch her in flagrante with a romantic platitude:
T he author of “Art” could afford the grandeur of a private house, or an aerie on the Seine, but she lives in a writerly apartment in an old building in a Left Bank cul-de-sac. A narrow dining room with a marble fireplace adjoins a big, square salon. Shelves lining a long wall are filled with art books and a few small heirlooms. There are two dark paintings on varnished wood that look antique but were done by Reza’s best friend, Moïra Paras, a Romanian artist who is, Reza says, her severest and most trusted critic. “We are opposites in almost every respect, but very alike,” she told me. Moïra, she writes in “Hammerklavier,” “couldn’t care less how the rest of the world sees her.”
Reza does her writing in an office, but she checks her e-mail at an old rolltop in a corner of the dining room. A mass of papers and purple tulip petals from a dishevelled bouquet littered the dining table. (Two vases of tulips figure in “God of Carnage.” They are part of the drama. Reza’s stage directions sternly forbid superfluous props or detail. They invariably read, “No realism,” “The barest décor possible,” “Maximal abstraction.”) We settled in the salon, on two deep white sofas covered with tribal rugs. An untidy stack of classical sheet music sat on top of an upright piano that Reza had bought with her first royalties—she is a passionate amateur musician—and under an etching of Beethoven. French doors opened onto a little balcony whose potted orange trees were shrouded for winter. The balcony overlooked an unkempt but charming park, with a crumbling stone wall at one end, where an old woman was feeding birds, and a playground at the other. It was almost empty at that hour, but a few children were making the noise of a dozen.
Reza’s own children—her daughter, Alta, a twenty-year-old law student, and her sixteen-year-old son, Nathan—were both at home. Reza had made Sunday lunch for them, and their father, Didier Martiny, a filmmaker, had come over to help Nathan with his homework. Martiny was Reza’s companion for twenty-three years. They met in college, and he has directed three films from her screenplays. They never married (there are no happy marriages in Reza’s work—“Conjugal life,” Nadine says in “Luge,” “kills everybody”), and they separated years ago but remain close friends. Nathan is learning Spanish, he told me, and Reza is relearning it. This spring, she will direct her first film, which is partly set in Málaga. It is the story of three sisters—one a movie star, one a housewife, one a struggling actress—and of their widowed mother, a Spanish hairdresser who, improbably, has become engaged to a younger man, her building manager. Emmanuelle Seignier plays the movie star. The story is drawn from an episode in “A Spanish Play” (2004), a drama about the profession of acting that is more self-consciously literary than most of Reza’s playwriting. (In 2007, “A Spanish Play” had a brief Off Broadway run, in a production directed by John Turturro.)
Reza’s protagonists tend to be dangerously wounded middle-aged or old men, like Samuel Perlman and Adam Haberberg. (A mature, infuriated bull makes a compelling menace on the stage, to himself and to others.) Her film will focus on women—“on their failed dreams and their solitude.” The character of the hairdresser is inspired by Reza’s mother, Nora. “It has taken me a lot of time, maturity, and daring to examine our relationship,” she said.
Nora Reza is a former violinist who abruptly ceased to play when she had children. (Yasmina never heard a note.) She was born in Hungary, and immigrated to France in 1950. On a trip to Budapest with Yasmina in 1997, she pointed out the elegant building on Vörösmarty Square where her family had lived on an entire floor. Her father was a rich wool merchant, and Nora went to school with the children of “the Jewish aristocracy.” Of all the girls, she told Reza, she was the prettiest. For several days, mother and daughter wandered through the city, and Nora, Reza wrote in “Hammerklavier,” reminisced “about her resplendent past without emotion, without apparent regret.” But she never lost her Hungarian accent: “My father must have liked it.”
Reza’s father, Elias, was a Russian Jew of Iranian nationality whose parents came from Samarqand. As a way to deflect anti-Semitism, his ancestors, when they were living in Persia, had changed their name, Gedalea, to Reza, a common Persian patronym. Fleeing the Bolsheviks, the family arrived in France sometime in the nineteen-twenties. Elias earned an engineering degree but later went into the import business. He was interned at Drancy, the camp from which French Jews were shipped east for extermination, but his name and his Iranian passport, Reza said, saved his life. She is the eldest of her siblings; she has a brother who is a film producer and a sister who is a psychotherapist. Yasmina is actually Reza’s middle name. “I won’t tell you what my parents called me,” she said. “It’s too absurd, and very French.” When she was seventeen, she embraced the sense of foreignness and singularity that she has always felt, by becoming Yasmina Reza.
Neither of her parents mentioned their experiences living under the Nazis (“The past is very vague in our family”), and Elias became observant only in old age. But one evening, after the Six-Day War, in 1967 (Reza was eight), her father suddenly “introduced the word ‘Jew’ into the house in an uncompromising, mythical way,” which is how she still uses it. She will often pause to reflect that a trait she is describing in herself or a character is “typically Jewish.” Her grandparents’ escape route from Russia to France was “a typical Jewish circuit.” Her sense of humor is a “typically Jewish distancing device that laughs at catastrophe.” “Jews don’t have much affinity for modesty,” she writes in “Dawn, Dusk or Night.” (Sarkozy’s maternal grandfather was a Greek Jew, and his father was Hungarian; those points of ethnic kinship with Reza have been widely noted.) Perhaps her most constant refrain touches upon her “Jewish anguish about assimilation”—a feeling that she has no roots, no native soil, no sense of place, no nostalgia for one. Even to establish the bare facts of her life in a conversation, like the one we were having, stirs her fear of captivity. “I am not what I say about myself,” she warned me later. “Writers inevitably return to their childhoods,” she remarks in “Nulle Part” (“Nowhere”), an autobiography composed in 2005 from vivid shards of memory and sensation. But a skittish name changer who comes from nowhere “has nowhere to return to.”
Any place, however, can be nowhere if, like Reza, you grew up, as she put it, “estranged from reality.” Her childhood home was a middle-class apartment in the suburb of Saint-Cloud. (She has admitted to giving journalists the impression that her background was much grander—“gilded youth, travels, cosmopolitanism, etc.”) Her father, she said, worked day and night, and her mother’s beauty was a similarly full-time vocation. (Reza was afraid that Nora would recognize herself in a passage of complacent prattle by the mother in “A Spanish Play,” “but luckily she didn’t.”) “It was a terrible childhood,” Reza said lightly, as if she were saying “a terrible haircut.” “My parents were too busy doing other things to bring up their children.” The most poignant sentence in “Nulle Part” evokes a memory of being lost as a little girl: “In this public park where my parents showed up to look for me—they who never looked for me anywhere—I ran toward them with so much joy that its lack of all proportion was a chagrin.”
Reza’s father was a self-made man with a reverence for French culture who recited Paul Valéry to his children. Like his daughter, he was a passionate amateur pianist, always furious at his own mediocrity. “At the piano, we are rivals,” she writes in “Hammerklavier,” where she also recounts a dream in which her father comes back from the dead to tell her that he has met Beethoven, who scolds him for presuming to imagine that he could ever play the Adagio from Opus 106. When Elias was dying of cancer, she writes, he did in fact massacre that movement, which he and Reza both loved. (He sits at the keyboard in his nightshirt, and “the waning light lays bare all the evidence of decay.” Reza’s reaction is to laugh uncontrollably at the catastrophe.) Yet for all his refinement and his intelligence, and for all her ironic tenderness in his regard, Elias, she said, was a brutal man who “didn’t know how to be a father. Yet his brutality wasn’t malicious. He was violent but loving. And I understood from our relations that human beings can’t be reduced. Without that revelation, I couldn’t have become a writer.”
If you read Reza closely, you realize that she almost never uses the past tense. There are also certain words that recur like an incantation both in her writing and in her speech. In “Desolation,” she is everywhere at pains to distinguish “joy” from “happiness,” and to exalt “frivolity” as an art of living but also as a form of unrepentant fatalism. Devenir, “to become”—in Reza’s sense, to become oneself—is ubiquitous. “To keep becoming is the obsession of everyone to whom I have given a name and voice,” she writes in the Sarkozy book. And then there are the nouns chagrin and fêlure. Chagrin can mean “pain,” “grief,” or “suffering.” A fêlure can be the crack in a hard surface—Flaubert describes human speech as a “cracked iron kettle.” But Colette uses fêlure as an essential rift in her being. It is the split between a male and a female seeking reunion in the act of love, and between a parent and a child who have lost their primal connection. I suspect it has that meaning for Reza.
I had hoped to meet with Reza once more, in New York, at a preview performance of “God of Carnage,” but she e-mailed to say that, with her film starting to shoot in a few days, she was too anxious and tired to come. “I would ideally love to make a film the way I write,” she had told me, “fast, no script, improvising as I go along, not thinking too much. ‘Art’ was written in six weeks. But I need more experience.”
On one of my last days in Paris, we drove to the muddy countryside with Reza’s art director and her assistant to scout locations, and tramped through several dilapidated châteaux. They were looking for a winding staircase with wooden risers and light from above; an old-fashioned bedchamber with a single window to the right of a long wall that was big enough for a piano; and a quality of soulful gloominess. Reza’s decisions—“yes,” “no,” never “maybe”—seemed to come, like her prose, from a well of mysterious assurance. “I know just what I want,” she said, “but the minute I’ve answered a question I feel like changing my mind.” ♦
