Louis, a hesitant, weak-willed, somewhat useless novelist, can’t even keep his own house clean. All he does is wander aimlessly from one room to the next, staying cooped up inside or chatting with his neighbors for hours on end. Even his loving girlfriend, Olivia, has fled the ruins of his existence. The problem is that Louis has writer’s block.
One day, François, a publisher who is also an old friend, offers him a job: can Louis ghostwrite a famous ex-con’s memoir? Louis accepts. It is the beginning of a long stretch of ghostwriting, hopping from one person’s life to the next. Although he couldn’t get inside his own characters’ heads to write his novel, he is now describing other people’s lives as though they were his own! The people themselves may get on his nerves, but he comes to love the experience as a whole: from the boredom of the interviews to the re-found joy of writing as he puts their words into shape on paper. The work helps him pull his own life back together, too. Olivia moves back in, and his own experiences wind up feeding the novel that was always in him.
Like La Femme de l’analyste (The Shrink’s Wife), Bruno Tessarech’s latest (funny and autobiographical) novel, Art nègre, is also about a character with writer’s block.

Art nègre is a novel about writing and its truths and its lies.