Laurent, a minor character in Nicolas Mathieu’s Of Fangs and Talons, was once “a show-off and a hopeless romantic, who loved B-roads and drunken weekends with friends.” That was in 1988, and in the next decade he “began designing massive supermarkets,” making the transition from liberal to neoliberal. “In those countries still recovering from a Communist hangover, he would build transparent towers, design shopping centres, trace a future of vegetable aisles, promotional sales and strip lights.”

What is termed “progress” in mainstream society is, in the novels of Nicolas Mathieu, almost always cause for an angry cynicism. Laurent has fared far better from globalization than most of these characters, but he is still far from content. His love life hits the rocks when his wife, Rita, a labor inspector, “remembered she was free and decided to leave him.” It was only then that Laurent, “who’d always been a nice boy, if a little slow on the uptake, had understood.”

Mathieu’s And Their Children After Them, which received the prestigious Prix Goncourt as well as rave reviews in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and other English-language papers upon its translation last year, was a lyrical journey through eastern France over four summers in the 1990s, as a cast of teenagers discover globalization’s deceits for themselves. His first novel — published in French in 2014 but only now translated into English by Sam Taylor as Of Fangs and Talons — is also set nearby, in the region’s Vosges Mountains. But in this book, industrial decline is not just a backdrop but center stage.