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Small Screens

Some small part of you may recoil at the idea of a fictional critique of television by a French author. After all, TV is a very American medium, and we more or less know what the French think of us. But Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Television is not that kind of book at all. For one thing, his narrator -- an academic on sabbatical in Berlin, trying to work on a groundbreaking study of Titian- - has an almost primeval understanding of the pleasures of television. “I spent most afternoons at home," he confesses, “watching television for three of four hours at a stretch, half-reclining on the couch, taking it easy…my feet bare, my hand cradling my privates. Just being myself, in other words." For another, Toussaint's tone is neither grand nor didactic, but wry and affectionate as he imagines his protagonist's little, everyday struggles. When the unnamed narrator's pregnant wife and son go on vacation to Italy, leaving him alone to work on his studies, he finds himself unable to concentrate. He decides--in part because he's blocked, and in part because of a nagging feeling that life's pleasures are passing him by--to stop watching television entirely. But as the withdrawal symptoms set in, he sees echoes of the little screen everywhere. He watches the lives of others at a remove, through windows and out of airplanes. He encounters computer screens and surveillance cameras that seem to hum with reproach. He experiences the chilling Rear Window effect of looking down on an apartment building in which he can see into a dozen little apartments, all of which seem to be watching the same dubbed episode of Baywatch. Television is a delicacy of a book, observed in minute, almost prurient detail, and it casts a sad but loving eye on modern life.

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