Gabriel's Inferno by Sylvain Reynard
Review by Rachel Stempel.
I graduated with my MFA in poetry last month and am heading onto a PhD program in critical studies in the fall, so naturally, I’ve been reading a lot of bargain bin romance novels.
When I taught creative writing, I often used the genre as an entry point—most are familiar, whether they want to be or not, with the Wattpad-to-Netflix pipeline:
The Kissing Booth (2018) is a prime example of why scene and summary needn’t occur simultaneously—if we’re watching action unfold, we don’t need to be narrated through it. After (2019) exemplifies the importance of sympathetic characters—it’s hard to feel for a character in distress when the stakes appear absurdly low. The Twilight franchise demonstrates the value of a faceless narrator—maybe not for four, 500-ish page books, but there’s no denying the cultural reset that occurred in tandem with millions of young, impressionable girls who could match, if they chose, Bella Swan’s plain description.
Mostly, I reference the genre—trope-ridden, bargain bin romance—because standing in front of a class gives me a platform to challenge who decides what literature is worthy. This always garners some suspicion. Easy A is no Scarlet Letter, right? Jane Tompkins would argue differently—in “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne’s Literary Reputation,” she exposes the artifice of Hawthorne’s assumed “essential greatness” in a deep-dive into the 19th century publishing and the coterie of culture industry that built and maintains cannon in self (white, heteronormative, etc)-interest.
But, I digress. I’ve been reading a lot of bargain bin romance novels—most recently, Gabriel’s Inferno, the first in a tetralogy by the pseudonymous Canadian writer, Sylvain Reynard. It’s got everything you’d expect—an uncomfortable hyper-fixation on protagonist Julia’s virginity, a bad-boy adoptee Gabriel with a hefty inheritance (in true Dickensian fashion), abusive exes, a dually forbidden romance between professor and student/a mid-30s man and his younger sister’s best friend, a narrative parallel between Dante and Beatrice that is, at times, surprisingly informative, and a three-part, soft-core movie adaptation on Passionflix, a streaming service run by Elon Musk’s sister, Tosca.
To be honest, it’s not great. Aside from the absurdity of the plot, there’s a ton of backstory of which we’re deprived. This narrative restraint doesn’t build tension but confusion. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to piece together that Julia met Gabriel, her best friend’s older adopted brother, after he’d just picked a fight in which he pushed his brother, Scott, onto a glass table, shattering it. He was crossfaded and thinks he hallucinates her, calling her his Beatrice. They hold hands. They kiss. They fall asleep in each other’s arms in the orchard outside his family’s home. When she wakes, he’s gone. Now, at 23, Julia is pursuing her masters to study Dante, and is sitting in his seminar at University of Toronto, praying he remembers what they shared six years ago. Of course, he doesn’t—not yet. And of course, their first interaction in this new setting characterizes Julia as timid and sheep-like and Gabriel as pompous and disturbed. This context should’ve been established before Julia overhears a phone conversation of Gabriel’s and somehow knows it means his adopted mother has died.
I had to get that out—the movie adaptation mimics this narrative restraint and even as someone who struggles with forthcoming storytelling (I’m a poet), it’s upsetting.
Yet, I stayed up ‘til the dawn birds sang two nights in a row, hunched over my laptop reading this. And I think it’s because the book fails, in an intriguing way, its genre’s primary expectation—the self-insert.
Julia seems to make the cut. She’s self-conscious, lonely, skittish. She’s a virgin so we can surmise she’s virtuous and needs to be protected. Then, she strays so far from these identity markers in a way that doesn’t make her character dynamic in the literary sense but rather, human. At one point, she tells Gabriel that he and Paul (a PhD student pining for her affection) seem to think she belongs in a children’s book. Paul is set up to be the antithesis of Gabriel—he’s sweet from the start. He’s not carnally driven. He gives her the keys to his study carrel. He takes her to see foreign films. He tries, with questionable success, to diffuse the tension between her and Gabriel after the first class. But as Julia insinuates, Paul, like Gabriel, has his own agenda, projecting onto Julia a “damsel in distress” persona. And Julia is aware of this perception, though she does little to challenge it. Gabriel and Paul are both selfish and don’t know Julia beyond their imagination, and I’m not sure Reynard does, either. She’s there on the page through the lens of a close third-person narrator, but we’re never close enough. She doesn’t seem real, and not in the angel-like way Gabriel will wax poetic. She’s mostly predictable, but the “children’s book” comment undoes the farce of self-insert.
I tried to understand this undoing as a failure, as something that supports my general notion that cis men lack the socialization that instills empathy, so cis male authors struggle with convincing female characters. The self-insert, then, should be a breeze. I won’t say this is an intentional meta-commentary—it’s not that smart. But it is there, through an enigmatic Julia who exists only—but actively aware of—the intersection of the idealized perceptions of the men in her life—Gabriel, Paul, and Reynard. And what does it mean for a writer to admit, intentionally or not, that they do not know their characters? Their self-inserts? And, by proxy, their audience? How is the transaction(s) between reader, writer, and text of this nature to be interpreted?
In From Work to Text, Roland Barthes argues a post-structuralist approach to literary engagement, defining “work” from “text” relationally. A “work” is comprehensive and stagnant, whereas a “text” is incomplete, metonymic, and in flux, and therefore is a lens allowing more potential for understanding the intricacies between the involved parties—writer, reader, text, publisher, the culture at large—and their signs and signifiers. Gabriel’s Inferno is a Barthesian “text,” one open to be deconstructed with little prying. Maybe Julia’s unknowability means this intertextuality is unavoidable, even for genre fiction.
I graduated with my MFA in poetry last month and am heading onto a PhD program in critical studies in the fall, so naturally, I’ve been reading a lot of bargain bin romance novels.
When I taught creative writing, I often used the genre as an entry point—most are familiar, whether they want to be or not, with the Wattpad-to-Netflix pipeline:
The Kissing Booth (2018) is a prime example of why scene and summary needn’t occur simultaneously—if we’re watching action unfold, we don’t need to be narrated through it. After (2019) exemplifies the importance of sympathetic characters—it’s hard to feel for a character in distress when the stakes appear absurdly low. The Twilight franchise demonstrates the value of a faceless narrator—maybe not for four, 500-ish page books, but there’s no denying the cultural reset that occurred in tandem with millions of young, impressionable girls who could match, if they chose, Bella Swan’s plain description.
Mostly, I reference the genre—trope-ridden, bargain bin romance—because standing in front of a class gives me a platform to challenge who decides what literature is worthy. This always garners some suspicion. Easy A is no Scarlet Letter, right? Jane Tompkins would argue differently—in “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne’s Literary Reputation,” she exposes the artifice of Hawthorne’s assumed “essential greatness” in a deep-dive into the 19th century publishing and the coterie of culture industry that built and maintains cannon in self (white, heteronormative, etc)-interest.
But, I digress. I’ve been reading a lot of bargain bin romance novels—most recently, Gabriel’s Inferno, the first in a tetralogy by the pseudonymous Canadian writer, Sylvain Reynard. It’s got everything you’d expect—an uncomfortable hyper-fixation on protagonist Julia’s virginity, a bad-boy adoptee Gabriel with a hefty inheritance (in true Dickensian fashion), abusive exes, a dually forbidden romance between professor and student/a mid-30s man and his younger sister’s best friend, a narrative parallel between Dante and Beatrice that is, at times, surprisingly informative, and a three-part, soft-core movie adaptation on Passionflix, a streaming service run by Elon Musk’s sister, Tosca.
To be honest, it’s not great. Aside from the absurdity of the plot, there’s a ton of backstory of which we’re deprived. This narrative restraint doesn’t build tension but confusion. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to piece together that Julia met Gabriel, her best friend’s older adopted brother, after he’d just picked a fight in which he pushed his brother, Scott, onto a glass table, shattering it. He was crossfaded and thinks he hallucinates her, calling her his Beatrice. They hold hands. They kiss. They fall asleep in each other’s arms in the orchard outside his family’s home. When she wakes, he’s gone. Now, at 23, Julia is pursuing her masters to study Dante, and is sitting in his seminar at University of Toronto, praying he remembers what they shared six years ago. Of course, he doesn’t—not yet. And of course, their first interaction in this new setting characterizes Julia as timid and sheep-like and Gabriel as pompous and disturbed. This context should’ve been established before Julia overhears a phone conversation of Gabriel’s and somehow knows it means his adopted mother has died.
I had to get that out—the movie adaptation mimics this narrative restraint and even as someone who struggles with forthcoming storytelling (I’m a poet), it’s upsetting.
Yet, I stayed up ‘til the dawn birds sang two nights in a row, hunched over my laptop reading this. And I think it’s because the book fails, in an intriguing way, its genre’s primary expectation—the self-insert.
Julia seems to make the cut. She’s self-conscious, lonely, skittish. She’s a virgin so we can surmise she’s virtuous and needs to be protected. Then, she strays so far from these identity markers in a way that doesn’t make her character dynamic in the literary sense but rather, human. At one point, she tells Gabriel that he and Paul (a PhD student pining for her affection) seem to think she belongs in a children’s book. Paul is set up to be the antithesis of Gabriel—he’s sweet from the start. He’s not carnally driven. He gives her the keys to his study carrel. He takes her to see foreign films. He tries, with questionable success, to diffuse the tension between her and Gabriel after the first class. But as Julia insinuates, Paul, like Gabriel, has his own agenda, projecting onto Julia a “damsel in distress” persona. And Julia is aware of this perception, though she does little to challenge it. Gabriel and Paul are both selfish and don’t know Julia beyond their imagination, and I’m not sure Reynard does, either. She’s there on the page through the lens of a close third-person narrator, but we’re never close enough. She doesn’t seem real, and not in the angel-like way Gabriel will wax poetic. She’s mostly predictable, but the “children’s book” comment undoes the farce of self-insert.
I tried to understand this undoing as a failure, as something that supports my general notion that cis men lack the socialization that instills empathy, so cis male authors struggle with convincing female characters. The self-insert, then, should be a breeze. I won’t say this is an intentional meta-commentary—it’s not that smart. But it is there, through an enigmatic Julia who exists only—but actively aware of—the intersection of the idealized perceptions of the men in her life—Gabriel, Paul, and Reynard. And what does it mean for a writer to admit, intentionally or not, that they do not know their characters? Their self-inserts? And, by proxy, their audience? How is the transaction(s) between reader, writer, and text of this nature to be interpreted?
In From Work to Text, Roland Barthes argues a post-structuralist approach to literary engagement, defining “work” from “text” relationally. A “work” is comprehensive and stagnant, whereas a “text” is incomplete, metonymic, and in flux, and therefore is a lens allowing more potential for understanding the intricacies between the involved parties—writer, reader, text, publisher, the culture at large—and their signs and signifiers. Gabriel’s Inferno is a Barthesian “text,” one open to be deconstructed with little prying. Maybe Julia’s unknowability means this intertextuality is unavoidable, even for genre fiction.
Sylvain Reynard is a Canadian writer with an interest in Renaissance art and culture and an inordinate attachment to the city of Florence. Reynard is the New York Times bestselling author of Gabriel's Inferno, Gabriel's Rapture, Gabriel's Redemption, Gabriel's Promise, The Raven, and The Shadow.
