Lighting up a satire

IN "The Little Girl & the Cigarette," the first of 10 novels by French author Benoit Duteurtre to be translated into English, a condemned cop killer's request for a final cigarette transforms him into a media hero. Meanwhile, a bureaucrat's secret cigarette in a bathroom leads to accusations of pedophilia after a little girl catches him blowing smoke out the unscrewed window, his pants pulled down below his knees and a screwdriver in his hands. How to explain such drastically divergent fates? Blame it on the children -- and that includes you.

In this satiric novel, published in France in 2005, children wield virtually unlimited power over adults, running rampant in municipal buildings, snatching seats on public transit and refusing to yield them to seniors or exhausted commuters. Meanwhile, laws erase liberties for adults, who resemble children more every day. Smoking, long the very image of adult sophistication and freedom, has been snuffed out of public life. Sound familiar? "The Little Girl & the Cigarette" questions our need to be coddled by the state. When we happily sacrifice liberty, do we regress to childhood?

The novel opens moments before the scheduled execution of death-row inmate Desire Johnson, who requests one last cigarette. For the warden, this creates a dilemma: Paragraph 176.b of the prison code forbids smoking, and smoke alarms could spark a riot among prisoners forced to quit if Desire lights up. But Article 47 of the Code of Application of Punishment guarantees condemned prisoners a final wish, including a cigarette. His quandary reveals a profound truth: In a hyper-regulated society, criminal behavior is unavoidable, because every decision violates some code somewhere.

Tobacco executives seize the opportunity to associate "tobacco with life as no ad campaign had managed to do before." Headlines scream: "When Anti-Smoking Saves a Murderer"; "Yes to Lethal Injection, No to Cigarettes!"; "No to Tobacco, No to the Death Penalty!" The Supreme Court exhaustively debates Desire's right to a final cigarette, roundly dismissing his court-appointed attorney's appeal for a commutation. Such nitpicking over banalities while consciously ignoring more important questions certainly seems to touch a collective nerve. Americans, after all, have seen special prosecutors fixate on sexual liaisons in the Oval Office, not to mention paternalistic regulation of personal choices, while people and corporations pollute the environment. As for Desire, he exploits media coverage of his final cigarette, gathering flowers on live television to write the words "Long Live Life" in colorful petals before he sits down to light up. The cop killer is now an advocate for flowers, children -- and life.