William Faulkner compared him to Chekov. Clearly, Faulkner hadn’t read Three Bedrooms in Manhattan.

We’ve just returned from a holiday in Cadaqués, Spain, and for the first time in my life, I’ve left a book behind. The book annoyed me so much that I didn’t want to take it with me to Girona. I wanted the physicality of it out of my life. So there it sits on a bookshelf in our lovely, family-run villa with a handwritten warning on the first page to any potential reader: don’t read this, it’s rubbish, read The Train. Knowing full well that is precisely the kind of inscription that would make me immediately read the book in question, Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, by the same author, Georges Simenon. 

You probably know the Belgian writer Simenon or have at least heard of his most famous character, the French detective Jules Maigret, played by Rowan Atkinson in the BBC adaptation of his detective series. Most people remember Simenon purely as a writer of detective pulp, which he was. Still, he also had lofty literary ambitions, set out to win a Nobel, and considered his Maigret novels (his words) “semi-literary.” Simenon wrote 425 books (okay, not all of them can be good) and has sold over 600,000,000 copies. I have tried to read a few of his non-detective books, but I haven’t liked a single one except The Train.

I don’t want to discredit pulp (though some can stay in the bin of history) because I consider pulp fiction an excellent place for instruction. Plus, I like it, and I’m not too snobbish to say so. I’m excited about the rise of New Pulp – rewriting pulp story arcs without the horrible stuff like endemic racism. This is good news because I feel that now, many of the characters and plotlines found in genre fiction are determined by algorithms, not necessarily by the organic world-building that occurs through the practice of repetition. In my opinion, too many fiction genre characters currently (looking at you Coleen Hoover) arrive at the page entirely made. The plot ‘develops’ (based on trends), but the character just changes their response, like changing shoes or using a different adverb. Anyway…

The Train is my favorite of Simenon’s books, and I’ve read it multiple times to study his execution. It doesn’t take long, a day or less, as it’s a slim book that feels almost cinematic in style and length. The first time I read it, I simply enjoyed the story; the second time, I wanted to figure out how he managed to convey an entire life through concision, and now I’m using it as a study of writing intimacy in lieu of emotional removal.

A part of what I’m writing attends to the intimacy of ordinary pining for another world, not to escape but to complete the vision one has of oneself. I often feel like my real life is being lived outside of the one I inhabit, perhaps by someone else, and that I am waiting for my actual self to begin. Of course, there are many reasons for this, but, speaking to other artists and writers, it’s a common sensation for those who have committed their lives to creative documentation and, more poetically, to dreamlife. To witness is to separate. 

I remember walking home from the train station one evening in London and having an acute sense of my separate self drop over me. It was late October when the sudden shortening of days still shocked us, and we were unaccustomed to drawing the curtains. All the windows on my terraced street alight, and inside each one was an entire life playing out in snapshots. On my street, existing inside my floorplan, were strangers that I felt I somehow knew personally by watching the six pm habits of their lives. I liked the feeling; on the one hand, I held endlessness, and on the other, insignificance, and this is a place, a hemisphere, inside a character that interests me greatly. It’s the place Simenon’s writing straddles in The Train straddles.

I think of this ‘place’ as the immortal nature of unimportant ordinary lives. Until something happens, something tragic and unimaginable that throws you from bucolic pastures into your unlived, utterly fervent life, your life and death life on a knife-edge, and back again, but altered. In The Train, the push is the arrival of the German invasion, and the citizens of a small town in France are put on a train for safe transport to La Rochelle. The people in Marcel Féron’s carriage begin to remove themselves from reality and behave like more accurate versions of themselves, for better or worse selves. A German Jewish Partisan, Anna, is in the carriage, and the book focuses on Anna and Marcel’s interactions. Anna is the most soulful character in the book (IMO) and is seen entirely through Marcel’s eyes, a removal that speaks volumes about who controlled the voice of the time.

I never stopped rooting for Marcel, yet throughout the book, I disliked him more and more. I’d go so far as to say his actions left me with a sense of disgust. The story is told through Marcel’s recollection and resolve to put the experience, as well as his love for Anna, behind him and re-enter his post-carriage life, therefore living inside another container of removal, but also, in a delusional way that Anna, being Jewish, is not able to do. It felt like a self-centered denial of humanity and personal growth through a denial of full reflection. Incidentally, this form of denial, which is a removal of raw human emotion, is exactly what I hated about Three Bedrooms in Manhattan: that and the misogyny. However, in The Train, the pointlessness of Marcel’s denial of reflection and emotional removal feels orchestrated and, therefore, works as a period piece set inside world trauma. Marcel has the privilege of re-entering his previous life, making his casualness feel like a character study of despotism and PTSD. The cruelty of the situation is only elevated by the pastoral, ordinary tone of Marcel’s voice. And pointlessness is the actual point when facing the enormity of an inconceivable situation becomes too great. In that way, we may be disgusted by him, but we see the part of ourselves that instinctively turns the other way, that turns off the news because we can’t face war.

However, denying reflection and growth outside of an extraordinary context, like in Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, just feels arrogantly naive. Context is key when removing a character’s growth potential.

The best stories know how to relate personal transformation into a universality that feels known and understood. At the end of The Train, I understood the protagonist’s silence, though I know I would have been a partisan, like Anna. Nevertheless, my disappointment in him felt personal and known. His need to reaffirm his positioning in his safe, ordinary world, ‘I have a wife, three children, a shop in Rue du Chateau,’ felt shameful, but again, known. The drama of passing through but never touching down, never putting our Western fingers into the soil of world tragedies, seems particularly relevant to current times. The incalculable magnitude of situations, like war or climate or displacement, can deaden our empathy, which is why, as a writer, sculpting intimacy inside emotional remove, even with a disagreeable, though understood protagonist, is a crucial witnessing to undertake.

Happy writing, everyone, and I hope you have found this valuable and insightful. Gxx