Vengeance is Mine, by Marie NDiaye

I know that if I met Maître Susane, the protagonist of Marie NDiaye’s unsettling novel, Vengeance is Mine, in real life I would have no clue that underneath her carefully curated exterior was a brain busily fretting, recriminating, and calculating. The struggling Bordeaux lawyer could probably make several therapists rich. She is also the absolute last person anyone should ask to represent someone accused of murdering their children.

Maître Susane’s anxious brain constantly returns to a single afternoon when she was very young, when her mother took her along on a job to clean a rich person’s house. That afternoon, the young Susane was invited by the client’s teenage son to go into his room. We never learn exactly what happened in that room. Maître Susane emphatically denies that she and the teenager did anything other than talk but something happened that she has never recovered from. When a potential new client comes into her office to hire her to represent his wife, Maître Susane is convinced that Gilles Principaux is that teenage boy. Unfortunately, Maître Susane’s mother cannot remember the name of the family she cleaned for that day. Too much time has passed.

Maître Susane’s anxieties (about the woman who cleans house for her in exchange for help emigrating to France, about her parents, about her lack of professional success) are temporarily pushed aside by the story of Marlyne Principaux. There’s no doubt that Marlyne did what she was accused of. The question is motive and whether or not Marlyne was in her right mind when she drowned her three children. Was it an act of vengeance against a controlling husband? Was it an act of terror springing from the fear that she would fail as a mother?

Part of what makes Vengeance is Mine so unsettling is the realization that we can’t tell if Maître Susane is telling us the truth. Maître Susane’s fears and worries are so overwhelming that it becomes clear that she’s not capable of accurately perceiving the world around her. Her client/housekeeper’s every facial expression is seen as condemnation or disgust. Her conversations with Marlyne and Gilles turn into long streams of consciousness that could partially be about Maître Susane’s reaction to what happened to her when she was a child. Maître Susane’s sense of reality deteriorates over the course of the novel, to the point where I wasn’t sure if things that are described really happened or if they were imagined by Maître Susane. I don’t want to fault the translator, Jordan Stump, but there are some very confusing parts of the novel that I had a hard time parsing.

Readers who prefer definitive resolutions will struggle with Vengeance is Mine. Readers who enjoy puzzling out the real from the imagined, the truth from the catastrophizing, may relish the challenges of this novel. I’m a bit in the middle, myself. I enjoy a good unreliable narrator but I had a hard time developing a theory about what was going on in Maître Susane’s life and in her head. Because I couldn’t get a good read (pardon the pun) on the situation, I’m not sure I understood this novel. I’m left feeling more than a little frustration with the book even though I pitied Maître Susane.