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"Scissors" by Stephane Michaka is a "roman a clef" -- a novel about real life incidents thinly disguised as fiction. In order to write a successful roman a clef about someone as well-known as American short story writer Raymond Carver, the novel must show us something new about its subject, in the same way that a new biography of Carver might take the known facts of his life and present them from a new angle.This novel doesn't tell us anything new about Raymond Carver.The novel focuses on the years of Carver's well-known Faustian bargain with his famous editor, Gordon Lish ("Douglas" in the novel) -- Lish would make Carver famous, if Carver would submit his stories to dramatic cuts, rewrites, and text insertions by Lish, making many of Carver's stories into hidden works of co-authorship with Lish.Carver agreed to the implicit bargain because, as an alcoholic and a womanizer struggling with a failing marriage and mired in debt, he was desperate to achieve fame and find vindication for his life's work. Eventually, Carver gave up alcohol, divorced his loyal first wife -- who had supported him financially and emotionally in his years of apprenticeship to writing -- severed his relationship with Lish, entered a happy second marriage with a poet, published more acclaimed short stories, and died in middle age, at the height of his career, of lung cancer caused by his third addiction -- smoking.The novel describes Carver's years with Lish through a series of imagined conversations between Carver and Lish, Carver and his two wives, and interior monologues by Carver, Lish and Carver's two wives.The focus on Carver's years with Lish means that the long foreground of his work -- the decades spent as a struggling apprentice writer -- and the years after he left Lish -- are dramatically shortened. Once Carver leaves Lish in the novel, he dies within a few pages, whereas in real life, Carver had a successful career after leaving Lish.The conversations and interior monologues are sporadically interrupted by short stories attributed to the fictional Carver, but actually written by Michaka. The conversations and interior monologues are often boring, and the short stories are rather dull.I can only guess that Michaka, a French writer, intended the novel as a homage to his admiration for Carver, and in France, where Carver is likely not as well-known as in the U.S., the facts in the novel may be new and intriguing. In the United States, where Carver's life and work are well-known -- the conflict between Carver and Lish has been exhaustively discussed in the American media -- a roman a clef about Carver needs to offer more than a fictionalization of his life.