https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/07/vernon-subutex-3-by-virginie-despentes-review-perfectly-over-the-top-end-to-parisian-potboiler

The concluding part to an extraordinary pulpy trilogy features rehab workers, cocaine fiends and much violence

Virginie Despentes made her debut with 1992’s Baise-moi (Fuck Me), about a killing spree carried out by two women turning the tables on male violence. Despentes directed the controversial film adaptation, which is probably what she’s still best known for, although she has written several other novels, as well as the nonfiction King Kong Theory, on her experience of rape and brief period as a sex worker.

Her latest book, Vernon Subutex 3, concludes a multi-voiced trilogy that holds up a cracked mirror to Paris between the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the Bataclan massacre. It’s been her biggest success yet, although Despentes is characteristically sceptical. “Once you have a male character,” she told an interviewer, “your novel is seen as a portrait of a generation ... if Vernon Subutex had been a woman, the novel ... would have been ‘The sad case of a female loser who did not get properly married and was not able to give birth.’”

Imagine, if you will, James Ellroy and William Gibson rewriting High Fidelity and you’re somewhere near the tone