What do we do now? It is with this question that Echenoz closes his humorous, strange, hyper-citational riff on the conventions of the noir and detective novel, Cherokee. Today, Echenoz's novelistic career looks like nothing so much as an extended effort to find different ways to ask and answer those prototypical questions of belated art: What do we do now? What can we do now? What is to be done? The variety of answers that Echenoz has furnished for these questions is impressive. In the violent, bizarre, even goofy meta-noir or adventure novels The Greenwich Meridian, Cherokee, and L’Équipée malaise (Double Jeopardy, 1986), Echenoz established his reputation as a writer with a talent for repurposing generic conventions and clichés. The publication of Lac (Chopin's Move, 1989) and Nous Trois (We Three, 1992) showed that his repertoire included espionage and disaster fiction. In the 1990s, Echenoz began to write novels that were less firmly anchored in genre fiction, but still circled around the clichés of popular fiction. Les Grandes Blondes (Big Blondes, 1995) is an adventure novel that borrows liberally from the plotting and thematics of Hitchcock's films; A Year is a kind of anti-mystery novel that explores multiple forms of homelessness; Je m’en vais (I’m Gone, 1999) is at once a sharp send-up of the contemporary art world, a polar adventure story, and a crime caper; and Au Piano (Piano, 2003) is a voyage into a (surprisingly mundane) afterlife patterned on the film Ghost (Gary Zucker, 1990), among other sources. In the 2000s Echenoz pivoted again and began to produce more biographical fiction, writing an homage to his former editor, Jérôme Lindon (2001), as well as novels about Maurice Ravel (Ravel [2006]), Emil Zátopek (Courir [Running, 2008]), and Nikola Tesla (Des éclairs [Lightning, 2010]). In recent years, Echenoz has continued to write in a highly referential mode, trying his hand at the war novel in 14, and returning to something like his early style of noir-espionage-adventure fiction in Envoyée spéciale (Special Envoy, 2016). As this overview suggests, although Echenoz has for decades dreamed up inventive responses to the question ‘what do we do now?’, the diversity of his novelistic corpus leaves us at somewhat of a loss to answer another basic question: what is this fiction?