Admittedly, when I read this novella last week, I was tired. Perhaps that’s not the best state of mind for reading Echenoz. His constant subversion can feel like a game that never lets up, and if you’re not in the right mood for that, it can be exhausting rather than fun. There’s a fine line between playful and tedious, and Command Performance tested that boundary for me. Yet, looking back, I feel more fondness than frustration—an outcome I wasn’t sure I’d reach.

In French, the book is titled Vie de Gérard Fulmard, which suggests a kind of ironic biography — a grand promise for a man whose life is anything but remarkable. The English title, Command Performance, shifts the tone entirely, playing with the idea that Gérard is being thrust into situations that seem important — political intrigue, crime, surveillance — while remaining hilariously ill-equipped for them. A “command performance” implies prestige and urgency, as if Gerard is being called upon for something crucial, yet we will see that his journey is marked by ineptitude and absurdity. The contrast between the titles reflects Echenoz’s playful subversion, framing a misfit’s misadventures as though they were something grand when, in reality, they are anything but.

Gerard is a man who seems to drift through events rather than shape them. Early on, he recounts “a modern classic among news items”: a piece of a satellite fell from space, landed in his neighborhood, taking out the local hypermarket, and killed his landlord—a tragedy that, for Gerard, turns out to be something of a convenience, given his growing annoyance with the man’s relentless rent collection.

Gerard is, by his own admission, a rather bland person (“I look like anyone else, only less so.”). Dismissed from his job as a flight attendant for undisclosed reasons (“I won’t elaborate on that cause, other than to say it earned me a suspended sentence and obligatory therapy.”), he reinvent himself as a private detective. But he’s not just bad at it—he’s comically, spectacularly unsuited for the role. Before long, he stumbles into the internal chaos of a political organization, but what seems like the beginning of a standard noir setup is anything but. Echenoz ensures that nothing unfolds as expected, leaving the reader to wonder what matters and what’s just there for the fun of it.

And there is fun to be had, both in the plot and in its many digressions. Take this passage, which follows Gerard receipt of a cash payment in large bills:

First, the money. I counted three thousand euros in bills of one hundred. This total delighted me, its distribution a bit less, as I’m not a devotee of large denominations. And since, given the current absence of a hypermarket, I shop in a minimart on rue d’Auteuil whose manager rightly assumes me to be economically enfeebled, I imagined his suspicious manner on taking one of these bills between reluctant thumb and index and casting an incredulous eye on it before passing it through his counterfeit detector.

In context, this is even funnier Gerard wants to assume the voice and mannerisms of a classic PI — detached, weary, effortlessly cool — but he’s hopeless at it. His would-be hardboiled observations crumble under the weight of his own ineptitude.

I’ve read and loved several of Echenoz’s novels, so I’m familiar with his wit, his detachment, his disruptions, and his playful approach to narrative. This one tested my patience more than usual. Maybe it’s because the balance between plot and mischief felt more lopsided, or because the book revels in narrative dead ends without quite enough payoff. And yet, despite my initial frustration, I found myself enjoying the memory of it more than I enjoyed the act of reading it — if not as a gripping story, then as an absurdist romp that, in its own meandering way, won me over.