The Brooklyn Rail

Influenced by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and other French novelists who’ve written explicitly about their own desire, their own shame, and their own losses, Édouard Louis begins his fifth novel, Change, with a statement of intent.

“To fix the past in writing, and, I suppose, to get rid of it,” he writes. Or is it that the past is “so anchored” in him that he’s “forced to talk about it”? “I don’t know,” he writes, not ambivalent so much as insistent on retaining both possibilities—in writing.

In his earlier books, including his first, The End of Eddy, the past Louis hopes to escape is his violent, homophobic upbringing in a poor town in northern France, where his family couldn’t afford to eat dinner every night, and where silently watching eight or nine hours of television on a set picked up from a junkyard and repaired by his father, was their only way of spending time together.

Escape meant changing his name from Eddy, which his father picked because it reminded him of tough men in American movies, to Édouard; it meant changing his face and his way of eating; it meant improbably attending lycée, then college, then the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, studying not passionately so much as obsessively; it meant coming out. It also meant learning to perform his life “the way you learn a role in the theater.” In order to attend lycée, he took up acting; at the same time, he changed his accent, scrubbing his voice of its history.

In Change, Louis details the most painful aspect of what he calls his metamorphosis: that inevitably, it meant leaving people behind: first his father, then his closest friend at lycée, Elena, through whom he learned about film and classical music, at least well enough to feel savvy and sophisticated, and whose family later accused him of taking advantage of their goodwill. (“I loved her,” Louis writes, addressing the reader directly.)

This is the past he writes to fix in Change: a time of racing ahead and leaving behind; a time when the future mattered more than the present, which was nearly inaccessible.

Depending on the study, social mobility in France is more or less as improbable as it is in the US. These studies are measures of a country’s attitude toward equality, and mobility is taken as a positive, but Louis’s specific route to a bourgeois life is lonely, even empty, if also freeing. In Change, he shows what he uncovered and what he lost along his way to “success,” a word he now finds silly. At dinner with Elena’s family, he learned about new emotions, like “torpor”; he also learned that people fixed in Elena’s class situation couldn’t access other emotions, like anger. As a traveler between classes, he had special access to both. But, as a traveler between classes, he also became “obsessed” with reinvention; what first felt like a necessity, a way to find a place for himself, became a painful tic. “At each stage of this life, of this race against myself, I’ve had to break with people I loved in order to move forward,” he writes. “I needed arrogance and violence to rid myself of the past.”

Louis’s style reflects his impatience. Some stretches of the novel are long and breathless, moving through vernacular language and references from his budding artistic life: Simone de Beauvoir, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, and a mentor and friend, Didier Eribon. He writes against the usual mobility narrative of individual resilience, instead thanking, and apologizing to, those who helped him and those he left behind. “My story is the story of their will and generosity,” he writes. These moments are the closest Louis gets to the defensive tone autofiction is sometimes accused of, a demonstration of goodness after a confession of shame. Otherwise, Louis resists “credit[ing] [him]self” with “the most beautiful, poetic intentions.”

At times, the declarative style used by writers like Duras and Genet to insist on a truth that’s little-known or taboo—a truth about poverty, a truth about womanhood, a truth about queerness, a truth about aging—feels mismatched with Louis’s more ambivalent attitude toward change. In The End of Eddy, he was moved to insist: the violence of his childhood was intolerable. In Change, he raises questions and leaves them hanging: “Maybe a hatred for change, without cause or explanation, is transmitted between bodies and through time,” he considers, reflecting on petty gossip about his move to Paris, “I don’t know.” A few lines earlier, he’s more self-critical, writing, “I don’t believe those who change are superior to those who don’t, at the time I did, okay, but not anymore.”

Louis does find a broader form for his shifting feelings on his own metamorphoses; he splits himself into roles based on who he’s addressing. Some chapters are fictional conversations with his father, others with Elena, others with himself in the mirror, and these performances collected together make up a truth. It’s not “the story of one person through time,” but, “a succession of characters who have nothing to do with each other, who don’t even share a name,” he writes, a subtle lamentation.