French Eroticism Withers in <em>Adèle</em>
With Leïla Slimani’s new novel, a literary genre gets its most joyless installment yet.
The primary character in , Leïla Slimani’s grimly vacant novel about a Parisian journalist who’s addicted to sex, yearns to be an object. She has no defining characteristics beyond her insatiable desire to be desired, her self-identification as a thing that gives men pleasure. A journalist married to a gastroenterologist, with whom she has a toddler son, Adèle is a difficult character not to dislike—shallow, lazy, and contradictory. She craves money and luxury as much as any postmodern Marie Antoinette, but despises bourgeois culture; she loathes her husband and resents her child for being a burden; she sleeps with
