Red Grass

Having read "L'Ecume des Jours" and done a dissertation on "L'Arrache-Coeur" it was time, some decades later, to look at more of Vian's work. 
Here are the usual tropes - weird machines (Vian was an engineer as well as a jazz musician, oh and also a writer) - Wolf and Lazuli are inventing a machine for, I think, retrieving lost memories via time travel ("a la remontee des souvenirs perdus" you could call it) and at one point Wolf finds himself ejected into space in a peculiar excursion. Then there's the red weed ("L'herbe rouge,") - if we're in science fiction and time travel territory, does this mean it's the same red weed as in Mr Wells' "War of the Worlds"?
There's also the outsider theme which as ever presents itself in the form of forbidding characters - there is less of this for the jeunesse doree of L'Ecume but it's there in L'Arrache-Coeur where the villagers are a judgy bunch. Here it's for example a pair of schoolmistressy types who debate feminism and the need to treat women differently (why not just be kind to everyone? Wolf asks reasonably). 
There is also a talking dog called Le Senateur Dupont who is key to the story's theme of You can't always get what you want, but if you did would it result in a vegetative state? Old Dupont when presented with his ideal - something called a 'ouapiti' which isn't the North American deer of that name, but some kind of new toy - declares himself 'entirely content and thus vegetative' and refuses to speak ever after. What would happen if we did find our spinifex man, or our ouapiti? Would we be content or would we wonder why, as with tracking down a mysteriously-glimpsed public house late at night it turns out to be a basic local pub closed in the 2010s and close to two others I completely failed to spot despite having passed by at least one of them in my time, why it was such a big deal? 
The language can be strange, not least because he is using some odd words to describe real things or odd words to describe unreal or irreal things and sometimes it isn't certain. Not a lot happens - L'Ecume and presumably his detective novels (as by 'Vernon Sullivan') are an exception to this Viannic rule. And it happens very oddly indeed.