This is part two of the trilogy. Vernon Subutex, the record store owner disappeared in the
first part and became homeless. Now, his former friends and other people, with less honest interests, find him back among the other homeless people (Charles, Olga, Laurent). Despentes keeps adding characters and all of them get the same depth of exploration. To her credit, they are all interesting, recognisable, genuine. She digs in their pasts, creating a very broad canvas in which the original plot - the search for the lost tapes of Alex Bleach the rock star - becomes a little bit too distant, yet her writing is so energetic, fast and politically incorrect, that as a reader you stay glued to her narrative, that rushes forward in the present tense, in a language and vocabulary that is young, and makes you feel part of what's happening.
Her characters, often relatively marginal to what is happening in society, are often more honest than the world around them, the world of fast food, fast sex, fast culture, fast money.
I had wanted to read the third part this year too. It's waiting on the shelf.
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