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A Rave Novel Rediscovered

Ann Scott’s “Superstars” captures the last gasp of pre-internet counterculture.

Many writers have tried, and few have succeeded, in capturing the experience of an all-night rave. Attempts to evoke techno’s oceanic feeling—this vortex of bodily sensations that seems to outpace description—tend toward the histrionic. Returning from such a dimension, it’s natural to want to shout it from the rooftops, but writers get a little overexcited, reaching for stylistic flourishes that rise to its intensity and the sense of having, ever so briefly, escaped the strictures of the normative world. It’s true that rave culture, with its insubordinate ethos and hedonistic drive, can provide a vantage point from which to question the existing social, sexual, and moral order—and a bubble in which to test out new ones. But this has culminated in a writing style plagued by purple excess and a tendency to overstate the politics of the personal, all in the service of justifying the culture’s existence as radical. “Raving is resistance” goes the fashionable platitude.

This utopian bent is wired into rave culture’s DNA, although it was often tempered by a healthy cynicism, as we see in Superstars, the 2000 cult novel by the French author Ann Scott, which follows a lesbian DJ’s misadventures, as told in the first person, in the toxic milieu of Paris’s fin de siècle techno scene. The many clubs and warehouse parties that the book’s protagonist, Louise, guides us through on her road to rock bottom are distinctly unsafe spaces full of broken people. Scott, a former musician raised between London and Paris, began the book as a memoir of her friend group, an entourage that formed around the ’90s queer club icon DJ Sextoy. A rare example of an author writing with a true insider perspective, it’s an unvarnished snapshot of rave culture’s second wave, when the major-label takeover was in full swing and techno was, as ever, being declared dead.

Following the romantic entanglements of a group of lesbian and bisexual club rats, Superstars is about the drama, the addiction, and the identity crises that come with staying up for three days straight. And crucially, it’s about being young in the city, and the relief of finding a family—dysfunctional as it may be—in a world of misfits unbothered by the circadian dictates of punching the time clock. We used to call that feeling nonconformity, and it was considered a virtue without having to think of it as praxis.

Like many spirals, this one starts with a manic high, when Louise opens her mailbox to find a record deal from Virgin Records to the tune of 100,000 francs. That’s a lot of money for a recovering heroin user living off her murkily defined roommate/best friend/lover, Pallas, and whose earthly possessions consist of a room full of music hardware—samplers, synths, compressors, floppy drives—that will soon be considered obsolete. The first thing Louise does is hoof it to the home of another kind-of-ex and perennial frenemy, a........

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