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Synopsis:

One of the premier French cult novels of the last thirty years, a tender and combative portrait of Paris’s queer rave scene in the 90s — for fans of Virginie Despentes and Gary Indiana.

Louise is a woman in her early thirties with a record contract, colorful roommates, and a passionate, volatile relationship with the lesbian community around her. She used to be part of the French rock scene, having dated and collaborated with a man named Nikki who was a crucial figure in that milieu. But she has been out of that world for years, having switched from rock to rave culture and, concurrently, having started to date chiefly women. Her longest and most combative relationship in this scene has been with Alex, another woman who has established herself as a DJ and has recently started seeing a much younger woman named Inès.
One day, Louise receives a life-changing advance from a record label to produce her own electronic music. She struggles to handle the responsibility of professionalizing her lifestyle, one suffused with the omnidirectional drama of the women in her circle, and with her own equivocations about her role in it. They bar-crawl, watch MTV, go to each other’s sets, hook up, and do copious drugs.
Tension builds as Louise finds herself pulled toward multiple possible paths: forward in her career in the techno world; backward toward rock’n’roll, Nikki, and the life he represents; toward Alex again; and toward Inès, leading to a dangerous and ultimately devastating affair. Ann Scott portrays the Paris underground in all its beauty, ugliness, and pulpy grandeur, with the caustic voice of a born punk struggling to conform to the standards of a new, hungry world of anticonformists.

Review:

In 2000, Ann Scott released Superstars, a novel about young women in the Paris rave scene, and it became a cult sensation. Twenty-six years later, we get an English translation, and the story feels like a time capsule, a reminder of how the late nineties so far removed that we can look back with nostalgia and horror. The story’s central character is Louise, a DJ and artist trying to figure out how to navigate her way through the dance scene. She is older than the rest of the women she parties and has sex with, in her early thirties compared to everyone else being in their early to mid-20s (except her biggest love interest Ines, who is seventeen). Louise is drifting from party to party, from drug to drug, and from woman to man to woman. Louise is not the most likeable character and her biggest flaw is that she does not see this in the actions and reactions of all of her friends. 

Louise is a pathetic character. Even though she has a record contract and an advance coming from Virgin Records for her debut album, the only reason most of her friends stick around is for her payday, the day her advance gets deposited into her account and she can pay back the money that she borrowed from all of them. Her friendship with the women and her place in the group barely makes it to this point because Louise has not only worked her way through most all of the friends sexually, she has some nights where she can no longer function due to her drugs and bad behavior. Louise is aware that her behavior is making some of her friend group distance themselves from her but she does not find their coldness as something she did. When her advance is deposited, even the money that they are owed is not enough to repair the damages that have been done. 

An unspoken thing about Louise with this group is her age. Since she is older than the rest of the girls, getting into the scene after a long relationship with Nikki, a guy who idolizes the Rolling Stones, and only embraces the rave scene due to her girlfriend Alex. I can see that her friends only accept her to a degree. She is someone to hang out with, but they do not trust her, probably see her as a bit of a poser, and none of them are close to her outside of the bedroom. I feel like there are some conversations about her behind her back, calling her creepy and pathetic. An older person in a young person’s scene is never fully embraced except for the things that she can do for them. Once she is too much of a hassle or is too annoying for them to be around anymore, they cut her off. She does not exactly understand. This might be that she has been in such a drug haze that she cannot recognize the way she is perceived and treated in her friend group. This becomes her downfall.

Superstar does feel like a time capsule, a walk down memory lane. I remember how popular some of the music she mentions was at that time. I did not go to raves or do heroin, but I would have been the same age as most of Louise’s friends at the time this takes place. When the discussion about the popularity of Marilyn Manson, particularly the album Mechanical Animals and the song “Dope Show”, I remember how much we listened to the CD in the car. There are also times when Nine Inch Nails and Aphex Twin are put on repeat in the background, and there were so many times when a CD would get played over and over while we did other things (not so much drugs as video games and reading books). I love the feeling and the vibes this novel brings, like a musical and cinematic moment in time is dusted off. Superstars also feels like many of the other drug books and movies that were very popular at the time, those stories where the drug use and the partying steal all of the time and creativity from many good artists that never finished their novel or their album. There could have been many more books telling stories equal to Superstars, but they were not written because the scene swallowed them up. Fortunately we get this novel and this perspective. It is a masterful document that very deftly illustrates how being young in the late 90s and early 2000s felt. I found this compelling and a little nostalgic to a time of renting videos for the VHS and smoking cigarettes absolutely everywhere. I am shocked that not only is this the first translation of Superstars, but it is the first of any of Ann Scott’s books that has been translated into English. I hope we get to read more of her work in English.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.