Édouard Louis

Is this a memoir or a work of fiction? If it is the former, it presents a pitiful person who is self-serving and ultimately unreliable as a narrator. If it is the latter, it represents a convincing portrait of the evils of self-promotion and the unrelenting search for status at all costs. Even calling it autofiction seems to be a stretch because Louis believes that memories are fungible commodities that can be exchanged depending on his current needs. This may be the case for fiction but seems ill-suited for a memoir.

A persistent theme of this work is the role that class plays in social mobility. If people are clever enough, they can mimic and adapt to the expectations of more prized social classes. Of course, this also entails shedding the skin of what is left behind, including friends and acquaintances. (I hesitate to use the phrase “loved ones” here since Louis doesn’t seem to love anyone but himself.)

The narrative follows Louis through his late teens and early twenties partially in the form of conversations with his alcoholic, homophobic and brutal father, and his upper middle-class female friend, Elena. The former represents what Louis is trying to escape and the latter what he is attempting to achieve. The story begins in the rural village of Hallencourt, moves to the provincial town of Amiens and finally ends in Paris. Along the way Louis morphs aesthetically, intellectually, and morally into the person he envisions. To his credit, he achieves this through a lot of hard work but one can’t discount the roles played by various generous sponsors.

Louis readily acknowledges his intentional stretching of the truth in this unsentimental and direct narrative. Of course, his focus is himself, so the other characters take a back seat, most of whom are not developed enough to appreciate their intentions or nuances. Louis’ unrelenting self-promotion imparts a mood of desperation to the book. In the end, however, he seems to be more exhausted than victorious.… (altro)

The End of Eddy, the first autobiographical novel by Édouard Louis published in 2014, was an account of the extreme poverty and homophobic violence he experienced growing up in a village in northern France. Change, which starts where Eddy ended, might well have been called the revenge of Eddy.

It’s about ambition as a desire to become someone else, success as revenge on those who abused and excluded him; as revenge on fate itself. Young Eddy is sent to a Lycée in Amiens specialising in the performing arts after a teacher in his village school discovers that he has a gift for acting. Hardly surprising given that he had been acting all his short life in a desperate attempt to fit in. He continues to display his theatrical skills after meeting a middle-class fellow student called Elena and her cultured family, consciously aping her manners, habits and interests. He begins to systematically change every aspect of himself: his accent, the way he walks, how he laughs, the clothes he wears, the food he eats and even how he holds cutlery, his hairline, his crooked teeth, and his name. He finances his reinvention by working as a rent boy. He determines to become famous to show his tormentors that he is better than them (famous for what is less important to him).

Change is a dream of revenge which comes true, but the victory is pyrrhic. Louis triumphs only at the cost of eradicating himself and his history. He moves on in the world but neglects to take his past with him. When he leaves Amiens for Paris, having been accepted as a student at the École Normale Supérieure, Elena accuses him of having used her and her family to his advantage. He is attacked by friends on social media as egotistical, manipulative and a social climber. His education estranges him from his family. Constantly moving on, in flight from his past as much as in pursuit of the future, he leaves behind him a trail of broken relationships. He finds himself in a sort of no man’s land; self-exiled from his own class and not fully accepted or at ease in the bourgeois world he has entered. His first book becomes a bestseller but the revenge of success turns out to be not so sweet or liberating as he imagined.

I’m making Change sound like an old-fashioned morality tale, beware of what you wish for and all that, and perhaps it is. Eddy effectively turns himself into a persona rather than a person. A deep ambivalence about the concept of social mobility in class societies runs through this novel. A hard-won scepticism which provides a healthy corrective to all those facile ‘change your life’ books.

Louis’ prose is spare, intimate, and as clear as a windowpane. His superb narrative ability draws the reader in and makes the book hard to put down (admittedly I read him in translation, I expect he is even better in the original French). He has a rare gift for extrapolating sociological and political argument from precise observation of experience. He writes about his emotions and his desire for revenge, his sometimes appallingly insensitive behaviour towards his mother, and his opportunism, with a frankness that is often quite chilling. I read Change quickly, swept up by the power and urgency of the story, but will certainly read it again. Its deceptively simple style contains immense complexity of thought about how we live now. Rather like Orwell, another master of self-transformation whose work blurred the boundaries of fact and fiction, Louis is a politically committed writer yet highly nuanced, even conflicted, and that makes reading him a fascinating but slippery business.

The great B.S. Johnson, who also obsessively told his life story and working-class family history in the form of novels, once said that novelists should write ‘as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter’. Édouard Louis is certainly doing that. He is a writer of profound moral seriousness whose apparently solipsistic narratives illuminate the whole of society.… (altro)