Tanguy Viel’s novels are peculiar variations on well-known novelistic genres: they creatively re-work familiar plot configurations, narrative strategies and thematic concerns. It would appear that this subversive re-activation of the genre can be related to this contemporary literary aesthetics which foregrounds blurring of generic boundaries and mixing of traditional forms. In this context the ambiguous generic status of Viel’s fiction deserves close scrutiny, which is precisely the aim of the present paper: it analyses his last novel Paris-Brest (2009) within the framework of selected contemporary theories of genre.