Vacances dans le coma

Marc Marronnier — the young, dandyish Parisian society columnist at the centre of Frédéric Beigbeder's semi-autobiographical trilogy — spends a single night, from seven in the evening to seven the following morning, at the opening of Les Chiottes, the most fashionable new nightclub in Paris. His DJ friend Joss has promised him the party of the decade, and Marc arrives ready to be dazzled.

What he finds instead is a long, glittering descent: a churn of models, socialites, hangers-on, and burned-out celebrities, fuelled by champagne and cocaine and the desperate need to be seen. Over the course of twelve hours the euphoria curdles into something closer to a coma — hence the title — as Beigbeder anatomizes the emptiness beneath the glamour.

The second book in the Marc Marronnier trilogy, Vacances dans le coma (Holiday in a Coma) is a short, acid, and very funny satire of 1990s Parisian nightlife and the cult of the party. Beigbeder, himself a fixture of that world, turns his cynical eye on the beautiful people even as his narrator remains helplessly seduced by them.