DAVID PLANTE, Fantasies of the Body, Bend, Oregon: Green City Book, 2026. ISBN: 9788-1-963101-12-6
Reviewed by Joshua Barrière
David Plante’s Fantasies of the Body returns to a recurring concern of his writing: the body as both a site of desire and a source of narrative reflection. Structured around a sequence of three relationships, the novel offers less a conventional series of love stories than a focus on the shifting boundaries between physical intimacy and fantasy. This tension is complemented by the narrator’s struggles with his Franco-American identity. Indeed, the novel participates in, and complicates, previous discussions within this journal. As Joan Vermette has noted, an important identity paradigm seems to be emerging in Franco-American literature: if our Franco historians are working hard to look at “what happened to us,” our Franco fiction authors are increasingly looking at “who that has made us.”1 There is no easy or universal answer to this question. Plante’s text exemplifies this questioning: the historical references to the Franco-American past don’t appear as objects of reconstruction, but as fragments internalized within the narrator’s consciousness.
The narrative follows an unnamed Franco-American narrator moving from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to London. The plot starts in Cambridge and focuses on the narrator's relationship with William. He then moves on emotionally and physically to Cecil in London. Finally, his relationship with an unnamed student at King’s College rounds out the novel. The first relationship with William, “the reserved Yankee” (4), is grounded in physical immediacy, yet even here, Plante resists descriptive realism. The narrator acknowledges the inadequacy of language to render the sexual experience, insisting that “all attempts fail” (11). From the outset, the body is thus both present and elusive, anchoring the narrative while simultaneously exceeding representation or description.
Just before meeting his great love, Cecil, in the book’s second section, the narrator reflects on his vision of Franco-American history, “We had begun our French colonies in forts [...] and they stayed in their forts until [...] the timbers of the palisade began to fall apart, and we became ghosts in the idea of our once holding our own in our forts” (26). The metaphor of the palisaded fort recasts collective history into a figure for psychological enclosure and estrangement. The placement just before the narrator’s first encounter with Cecil is not arbitrary. It denotes the narrator’s rupture with this ghostly nostalgia, la survivance. This is illustrated when he moves to London, far from any New England mill town. Interweaving his interpretations of the past throughout the piece, Plante brings forward how Franco-American history and culture are alive in his interactions with the British.
The subsequent relationships intensify this movement away from corporeal immediacy. With Cecil, the narrator’s attachment shifts. The palisaded fort is indicative of this shift toward an affective and intellectual register; the narrator separates his physical and sensual love from the metaphysical fantasies of the body. We see how little sensuality and physicality is present in the narrator’s relationship with Cecil: “He was liked and I, with him, was liked” (43). The abruptness of Cecil’s disappearance, his death occurring without narrative elaboration, exemplifies Plante’s technique of rendering poignant emotional events in an understated manner. This strategy recalls, as the text itself suggests (14-15), the narrative economy associated with E. M. Forster, where the apparently incidental can acquire enduring resonance. In Fantasies of the Body, this attention to the incidental may also carry a broader cultural implication. The events that shape the narrator’s emotional life frequently appear muted, almost secondary, just as Franco-American identity itself is often figured as marginal, self-effacing, or unspoken. Yet the novel suggests that such apparent insignificance is deceptive: what is treated as incidental continues to exert a quiet but persistent force. In this sense, Plante’s aesthetic mirrors the condition it evokes, as Franco-American experience, however subdued, remains deeply formative.
The novel also articulates a distinctly Franco-American paradox. On one hand, the narrator states that “never did I meet a Franco, as we were called; and if I had, I would not have wanted him to know I was Franco, too” (25). And yet, further in the novel, the narrator remarks that “I didn’t see myself as American, but someone born and brought up within a French speaking parish” (79). There is a persistent pressure to project an assimilated, “American” image of the self. Yet within Franco-American consciousness, this image remains unsettled, haunted by lingering clouds of priestly incense and matante’s cigarette smoke. Despite all the pressures of assimilation, both internal and external, there are persistent forms of memory and inheritance.
The final section, devoted to the narrator’s fixation on an unnamed undergraduate during his time as writer-in-residence at King’s College, completes this triad of fantasies. Here, the relationship unfolds primarily in the realm of projection: the beloved is explicitly designated as a “fantasy,” and the narrative space becomes increasingly interiorized. “He was my fantasy, and though the fantasy was embodied in him, he appeared to have beneath his loose clothes, a fantasy body. I knew I was in love with a fantasy” (84). The progressive abstraction, from the tangible body to the imagined one, constitutes the novel’s central structural principle.
This formal progression invites comparison with André Gide’s Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, in which the accumulation of legal cases presented produces conceptual intensification rather than clear narrative resolution. Similarly, Plante’s three-part structure leads not toward emotional closure, but toward a heightened awareness of the distance between lived experience and its imagined articulation. Initially, William’s body is clearly present. The narrator admits that “I love your body when we make love” (23). Then finally, the unnamed student becomes the ultimate signifier of fantasy, where the entire relationship seems to reside in varying degrees of projection. “He appeared to be a constant presence in my set— appeared, because he was mostly in his room working on revisions” (90). Each relationship marks a further step away from lived reality and toward a progressive detachment from the physical body and toward the fantasy.
Plante’s use of the body as a driver of narrative is nothing new in his work. Indeed, this formal and thematic trajectory gains further resonance when considered in light of an earlier, unpublished work. In a short story sent to Claire Quintal and written entirely in French, Odeur du corps,2 Plante was already using the body as a symbolic engine of narrative. In that text, Louis, the protagonist, awakens one morning to find himself smelling of roses; what initially produces anxiety is ultimately reinterpreted as a sign of sanctity, suggesting a complex intertwining of corporeality, spirituality, and identity. The narrative, moreover, is permeated with oblique references to homosexuality and the tensions surrounding its expression. Although the structural logic of Odeur du corps differs markedly from that of Fantasies of the Body, the underlying preoccupation remains consistent: the body is not just something described in the text, but a central place where desire, identity, and meaning take shape. This continuity is further underscored by the letter accompanying the story, in which Plante expresses his frustration at a New York Times editor’s substitution of “French-American” for “Franco-American.” Such a correction, seemingly minor to the editor, speaks to the broader difficulty of sustaining Franco-American identity within an American mosaic that often forgets the existence of Francos. Plante’s insistence on the term signals his investment in this identity.
Fantasies of the Body demonstrates that Plante’s Franco identity continues to inform the conceptual architecture across much of his work. Much as Annie Ernaux’s recent writing (Le jeune homme, 2021) has reframed our understanding of her earlier narratives (L’événement, 1984), this novel invites a rereading of Plante’s work as a sustained exploration of desire, memory, and the limits of representation. Its engagement with the body, at once material, symbolic, and imagined, confirms the centrality of these concerns across his literary production. In his own way, Plante brings his queer and Franco-American identities to the fore through his exploration of the body. He demonstrates how these identities may manifest themselves through seemingly minor details while remaining formative forces in the lives of the narrators.
Notes
(2) David Plante to Claire Quintal, June 8, 1992, Claire Quintal Papers, Unprocessed, French Institute, Assumption University, Worcester, MA.