Book review: Raymond Jean’s Reader for Hire might just be the perfect novel

Raymond Jean’s bestseller was first published in 1986, and a new translation shows that after almost three decades the elegance is still there.

Raymond Jean, who died in 2012, writes about the purpose of books. Sophie Bassouls / Sygma / Corbis

"Marie-Constance, thirty-four years old, one husband, no children, no profession," is a blank page, until she advertises herself in a newspaper as a Reader for Hire.

“Let me introduce myself,” she begins Raymond Jean’s bestseller, first published in France in 1986. No more than a voice, she waits until page 49 to tentatively wonder, “Perhaps the time has come for me to describe myself.”

Through her first disastrous reading engagement, Marie-Constance discovers “I don’t know anything about human relationships”. But then, as she realises, “writers who deal in realism come up with the most outlandish things”.

Reader For Hire is not a realist novel, but a very French story of embodied ideas, proved on an innocent abroad. Somewhere between Voltaire's Candide, and de Sade's Justine, dogged Marie-Constance embodies the virtues of constancy and their flipside, much as Candide does, truthfulness. Like Justine and Candide, Reader for Hire is a picaresque, one adventure following another as Marie-Constance reads to a disabled teenager, a revolutionary widow, a lonely businessman and more. Like Justine, she tells herself she wants "an interesting respectable job" but the situations she finds herself in are anything but.

She succumbs to one listener’s advances out of “good nature”, but has no real grasp of her own desires. “Oh my God who am I?” she wonders, just before finding herself the victim of a “pure fiction” dreamt up by a listener’s mother. “Reading’s all very well,” says the arresting officer, “but that’s not an alibi for whatever takes your fancy.”

As her adventures continue, Marie-Constance is forced to form opinions, discover desires. “I’m not just a ‘person’, I am becoming someone,” is surely a pun on the French “personne”, the feminine noun that also means no one. Her discoveries are not necessarily self-realisation; perhaps they are no more than a post-modern ability to manipulate a range of identities.

The Reader for Hire becomes playful, adding (fake) glasses for "a little intellectual touch I lack", changing into a "preppy" jacket. Her friends suddenly remember she was a college actress, her star role, the silent slave, Lucky, in an all-female performance of Waiting for Godot (a casting decision Jean, who died in 2012, would have known that Beckett had strictly forbidden). "I did very well with comedy material," Marie-Constance says, naively (or archly).

The Reader for Hire is never sure who is in charge, and nor are we. “A model reader should be a perfectly neutral and biddable instrument,” Marie-Constance congratulates herself on reading de Sade aloud with composure. However she finds that, for her listeners, “Any book will do, if and when it’s spoken by me”.

Her listeners are not changed by books, but use them to reinforce their illusions: the Marx-reader keeps a servant, the teenage boy never gets what he so obviously wants. Marie-Constance’s ex-tutor, Sora, isn’t much better. The more she reads, the more she begins to find his literary advice “utterly condescending”.

“There used to be posters and tracts in every direction, and a smell of revolution,” she remembers, visiting him at his university. “Now there are just styrofoam cups and old tissues on the floor, and a smell of Coca Cola.”

Reader for Hire might be the perfect book – written with an elegance whose validity it also questions. Small in the hand, and big in the brain, it asks what books are for, how they substitute for our desires. It is cynical about books and their readers, though more hopeful about the possibilities of life lived in conscious opposition to narrative. Books may do much to comfort, says Jean; it is a shame they can do no more.

Joanna Walsh is a UK-based writer. She edits fiction at 3:AM magazine and runs @read_women