How a poor boy from industrial France prepared to infiltrate the Parisian elite
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In 2014, a young French man wrote En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy). It was a debut novel, though an autofictional one: a harrowing portrait of childhood in a poverty-stricken village in the post-industrial French north, where he endured brutal homophobia. His second book, 2016’s Histoire de la violence (History of Violence), then detailed the events of Christmas Eve 2012, when he, at the age of 20, was raped at gunpoint by an Algerian man he’d picked up earlier that evening.
By this point, Eddy Bellegueule had changed his name to Édouard Louis, and moved to Paris to study at the prestigious École normale supérieure. He had become a voracious reader, and had found a friend and mentor in the esteemed philosopher Didier Eribon. All of this fostered his politicisation, as was clear from his next two books, Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father) and Combats et métamorphoses d’une femme (A Woman’s Battles and Transformations). This duo of slim but searing works combined excavations of personal bitterness and trauma with dispassionate sociological analysis.
Immediately identifiable as the work of the same author of The End of Eddy and History of Violence, not least because of some repetition of now familiar material, these were, however, presented to the reader as works of non-fiction rather than autofiction. Louis used the grim realities of his mother and father’s lives – deprivation, precarity, unforgiving physical labour, ignorance and ingrained racism, sickness and addiction – to illuminate the hardships of France’s poorest and most disenfranchised white citizens.
Plenty of lazy critics have fallen foul of the temptation to brand Louis as France’s answer to JD Vance, the venture capitalist-turned-United States senator, and author of Hillbilly Elegy, a bestselling 2016 memoir about growing up in Rust-Belt Ohio. Quite aside from the differences between the two men’s politics, it’s an evaluation that reduces Louis to the role of ethnographer, and his fictional avatar “Eddy” to a paint-by-numbers hero in a rags-to-riches story.
Although it lacks the more obviously shocking confessions of Louis’s first two novels, Change (first published as Changer: methode) furnishes us with what feels like the most nuanced and candid portrait of Louis’s life yet. There’s a brief reminder of the circumstances and details of his early childhood, but not only does Louis possess an uncanny ability to retell the same story – that of his life – from a seemingly endless series of new perspectives and angles, but the principal narrative here picks up where The End of Eddy draws to a close, as Louis is accepted into lycée in Amiens when he’s 14, and it charts his life there until he moves to Paris as a 19-year-old. These are the years in which his transformation from Eddy Bellegueule to Édouard Louis begins in earnest.
At school in Amiens, he befriends a fellow student named Elena, under whose tutelage he gains entrance to a “radically foreign” world; one in which people lead “gentler, more privileged” lives. Note the work that’s done by that first word. A sociologist speaks in terms of empirical advantages or disadvantages; it takes a novelist to evaluate by means of emotional textures. Elena introduces Louis to arthouse cinema and classic literature, but she also teaches him how to use a knife and fork properly. Although never involved sexually, their relationship is every bit as all-encompassing as a grand romance. But before long, Louis grows restless.
In Change, Louis razes his own psyche with the same unsparing ferocity that he applied to revealing every squalid detail, every act of brutality, every note of despair in The End of Eddy. He exposes his desire to “be avenged” for his childhood even while he’s flooded with shame – about both where he comes from and who he is: a man “bursting” with desire for other men. He’s frank about being assaulted with “jealousy and anger” when, in his late teens, he first meets Didier, the draw of whose lifestyle in Paris is what triggers Louis’s rejection of his life in Amiens. (Didier is also gay and from a working-class background, but now enjoys enviable sexual and intellectual freedoms in the capital.) But Louis also recognises the violence and hatred that’s folded into this denunciation, and the pain he’s causing Elena.
“I wrote to exist,” he explains with characteristic simplicity towards the end of the book – for the story here is also that of a young writer finding his voice, a voice that’s rendered with sophisticated clarity in John Lambert’s translation – shoring narrative and once “unspeakable” truths against his ruin. But does writing about it help rid him of his past? Perhaps it’s “only bolstering its existence and its ascendency over my life,” he worries. “[M]aybe I’m trapped.”
The paradox, of course, is that his salvation is also his damnation. Of all the change described herein, the metamorphosis that made the strongest impression on me is that of a young man who once imagined “the possibility of total and absolute escape”, but who now realises that no matter how far he travels and how much he changes – his appearance, his system of beliefs, the people he loves and hates – the ultimate evasion will be forever impossible.
Change, tr John Lambert, is published by Vintage at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
