by JULIET WATERS

Mammals, despite its all-inclusive title, is definitely not a book for everyone. Too bad because it might be nice to live in a society more likely to take it for what it is, a funny, soulful, bitter defence of alcoholism, failure and ennui. While Frank Wynne had done an admirable job of translating Pierre Mérot’s biting words, however, there’s not much he can do about translating the philosophy that will probably make this book a harder sell in North America than it was in France.

Imagine a Nick Hornby novel where the anti-hero stays an anti-hero. He doesn’t settle down with a patient lawyer, or insert himself amiably into a single-mother family. He doesn’t choose to find comfort and meaning in what civilization deems to be comfortable and meaningful. He just stays what he is, a mess, but essentially harmless to anyone but himself and dares the world to accept him as that.

“Every Model Family should have a fuck-up: a family without a fuck-up is not truly a family, because it lacks an element that challenges it, thereby reinforcing its legitimacy.” So starts the story of “the uncle” a forty-year-old man who “lives in a studio flat thirty metres square, like a child’s bedroom without the parents. The space the uncle occupies is inversely proportional to his age: at thirty, he lived in an apartment fifty metres square.” More of a polemic than a novel, Mérot’s vision of society serves essentially the same purpose as the role of the uncle in his family. It re-establishes the Miller and Bukowski tradition of the writer as the defender of failure and failures, and the enemy of success and complacency.

We never learn the name of the uncle, though he does take on a detailed life of an individual. From a successful middle class French family, it’s no surprise that he despises his domineering mother and is indifferent to his passive tolerable father. He is probably fairly typical of his generation: a starter marriage with a beautiful but miserable Polish girl and a series of dissatisfying jobs—internship at a museum, management position at a reasonably cool incarnation of an early Web zine, editor at a reputable but essentially incompetent and corrupt small publisher, high-school teacher, unemployment insurance drunk and now, finally, writer.

The uncle is at his best when he is at his worst, wandering blithely through the demimonde of his neighborhood, falling cluelessly into bed with any number of self-destructive young women alcoholics, and older co-dependent drama queens available to him. He waxes beautifully about the 80-year-old drunk doyenne at his local bar, writes terrible poetry to the few women he may have actually loved and makes grand pronouncements that for some readers may ring uncomfortably true. “Nobody can live permanently as part of a couple. Those who do so are not wonderful romantics but profoundly depressed individuals.”

The scariest thing about Mammals is that it probably has a lot more to teach women than men. For anyone who has ever spent time trying to figure out the mystery of how some losers seem to have an endless supply of babes, Mérot does a pretty brutal and simple job of answering that. Women love lost causes. Mérot also deserves some credit for being realistic. If this were Nick Hornby, there would be hope for the babe and the guy she saves. Mérot at least seems to be truer to the odds of this actually happening.

Take Mérot too seriously, or expect him to put his obvious talent towards a more durable, productive philosophy—which most readers probably will—and Mammals is bound to be a disappointment. There are those sad readers who may enjoy this book a little too much for their own good. But if you’re the kind of reader that can take this book for what it is, a funny, sad, raging voice against our most cherished assumptions, Mammals is a quick, fun, boozy read on a cold, dull winter night.

MAMMALS BY PIERRE MÉROT, ANANSI, PB, 216PP, $21.95