AMANITA

Julien Guerville

(Calmann Levy, 249 pages, 2021)

Calvin works a night shift at the ProSol petrochemical plant near the imaginary town of Poghorn in a country that remains unnamed. He wakes up every day with the taste of vinyl polychloride and hydrogen chloride coating the back of his throat. Living alone in a rustic cabin he built for himself, he spends his daytime roaming the mountains and valleys where the scent of molted polymers mingles with that of decaying earth. Assisted by his beloved dog, Job, Calvin, a talented chemist, forages for the psychoactive mushroom, Amanita muscarias, the key ingredient in the preparation of Mô, an ancestral drug once used by local shamans.

 Contaminated as it may be, to Calvin and the misfit community of Prosol employees, this ecosystem is home. The surrounding nature, ever resilient, offers glimpses of beauty, and a bountiful crop of mushrooms. In and around Nutts, the workers’ housing complex precariously built in a flood zone, Calvin’s in-demand artisanal hallucinogenic pills ensure him a measure of respect, not to mention extra income. There is a 24/7 makeshift bar where he hangs out with his two buddies Freddy and Kutz, and there is the whorehouse where he shares some intimate moments with Nina. A dutiful son, Calvin also pays regular visits to the retirement home to spend time with his mother, who suffers from dementia and no longer recognizes him.

 Two events come to disrupt Calvin’s routine: first, the arrival of his sister-in-law, Kimiyo, who shows up at his doorstep with a black eye and a broken nose. She is fleeing Thomas, Calvin’s brother, a wealthy best-selling author. Even more troubling is the imminent closing of the plant, suddenly announced on TV. Kimiyo’s presence stirs ambivalent desires in Calvin, a man with little talent for the complexities of love. When he is thrown into the position of union leader and asked to negotiate the survival of the plant, Calvin lacks the necessary acumen to navigate the financial intrigues of elected officials and ProSol executives. Conflicts between workers and environmentalists, a drug-saturated society, political corruption, and a sensationalist media—the marginalized microcosm in which Calvin has found his place is an echo of our contemporary world.

 With its visceral and startlingly visual prose, Amanita immerses us in an imagined landscape that evokes places that feel familiar; the extended region around Prosol with its orange groves overlooking the sea could be somewhere in the Mediterranean. Nutts and its mobile home park brings to mind rural America, and Poghorn with its gaudy neons, ostentatious wealth, and seedy streets reminds us of the somber decadence of Gotham. From the psychedelic colors of the sky—are we, too, hallucinating on Mô?—to the chemical emanations saturating the air, Guerville plays on all the senses to irresistibly pull the reader into the somber and addictive atmosphere of a new shade of roman noir: dark, as it should be, but not without fleeting moments of pleasure, poetry, and music that will linger in the mind long after you turn the last page.

Amanita is Julien Guerville’s first novel.