How Not to Write About Class
For over a decade, Édouard Louis has been one of France’s most perceptive writers on his country’s working class. But as he has drifted away from this milieu, he has swapped clear-eyed analysis for cliché-ridden romanticization of the suffering poor.
Édouard Louis’s career offers a lesson in how to think about capitalism’s harms. Once a sharp chronicler of working-class life, his later work portrays the poor as simple victims lacking agency. (Carsten Koall / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
É douard Louis was only twenty-one years old when his debut novel, The End of Eddy, became an overnight sensation. Taking its cue from fellow French writers such as Annie Ernaux and Didier Eribon, the memoir described the author’s upbringing in a small working-class community in northern France. From start to finish, its vision was unremittingly bleak. Here, brought to life in painfully exacting detail, was the reality of la France périphérique: a postindustrial landscape ravaged by austerity and caught in a seemingly unending cycle of violence, addiction, and abuse.
Despite its punishing subject matter, The End of Eddy became a bestseller in France, and when Michael Lucey’s English translation was published two years later, it was met with international acclaim. Working at an enviable rate, Louis has since published six more books, all of which have returned to similar territory: attempting to expose the brutality of the French class system. As Louis has written elsewhere, mainstream literature has often been “constructed against” working-class lives. His novels, however, are intended to redress this imbalance, “writing against literature” in order to restore such lives to cultural visibility.
This is evidently a noble mission. And yet, looking back on the last decade of the author’s career, it also seems clear that these good intentions have been compromised by the speed of his success. After all, Louis is no longer the scrawny gay boy described in The End of Eddy but a celebrated public intellectual, whose work has been translated into over thirty languages. One of the side effects of this celebrity — as critics on both the Left and Right have noted — is that the author has been absorbed into the very cultural elite he once sought to critique, producing an irremediable rupture between his own life and the lives of those he chooses to depict.
Crucially, this rupture is not only a discursive problem. Although Louis still writes in first person, he is no longer able to serve as the protagonist in his own novels and instead is relegated to the margins of the text, where he observes and comments on the trials of his working-class subjects, most often his parents and siblings. This switch from the hauntingly introspective narration of his debut to a more voyeuristic third person might be interpreted as an honest reflection of the author’s changing circumstances. However, it also lends Louis’s later work an uncomfortably ethnographic feel, in which his characters only appear as tropes observed from a safe distance.
Class Beyond the Clichés
These defects are particularly pronounced in two of the author’s most recent works, Monique Escapes and Collapse, both published this spring. Monique Escapes is the second of Louis’s books to focus on his mother: describing her attempts to escape from an abusive relationship and reclaim her independence. The narrative commences as the author is attending a writer’s residency in Athens, working on a theatrical adaptation of one of his novels. One night he receives a call from his mother, who informs him, through tears, that she is leaving her partner. The man is an alcoholic, she explains, and has begun to her harass her when he is drunk: calling her a whore, making fun of her children, and on occasion becoming violent with her. “I don’t know why I have such a shitty life,” Monique sobs, “why I only meet men who stop me from being happy.”
Louis is understandably distressed, confessing that this is only the third or fourth time he has ever heard his mother cry. For reasons never fully explained, he is unable to leave Greece. However, he swiftly arranges for his mother to move into his vacant apartment and, in the months that follow, continues to provide her with material support: sending money, ordering food to the house, and searching for an affordable flat for her to live in. Within the relative security of this new setup, the novel shows how Monique is able to recover her confidence and start building a new life for herself: a life that was far from certain when she first left through her partner’s door.
Given this redemptive arc, Monique Escapes might represent Louis’s most optimistic novel. Yet the author is careful to avoid the temptation of sentimentality, maintaining a prose style that is spare, unadorned, and affectless. This quasisociological mode of writing even extends to Louis’s depiction of his characters, who he gives little psychological depth. In the case of Monique, for instance, the reader is only able to register her emotions through external signs: “she cried,” “her voice was hoarse,” “she shrugged,” “she grimaced.” This approach is surely intended to force readers to engage more analytically with the material facts of Monique’s situation. However, it serves to undermine the emotional and moral complexity of the events Louis is describing.
Even when Monique is permitted to show feeling, Louis quickly subsumes these emotions into a generic narrative about class. When she notes her tiredness, for instance, the author responds:
Tiredness had always been the central sign of injustice of my mother’s life. Tiredness at being reduced to the domestic sphere, tiredness at being humiliated, tiredness at having to run away, tiredness at having to fight, tiredness at having to start all over again
This commentary is well-meaning. And yet the author’s class analysis seems almost laughable in its earnestness. Moreover, it demonstrates Louis’s inability to think beyond a highly deterministic framework. Once again Monique is denied any psychological reality, reduced to little more than a cipher: ironically denied agency in a story about her struggle to reclaim it.
Many of the same problems are also apparent in Collapse, Louis’s second publication of the year. In a strange parallel, the book also begins with a phone call from the author’s mother: this time to inform him that his brother has been found unconscious and rushed to the hospital. The prognosis is not good. His heart is no longer beating, his liver has ceased to function, and a cancerous tumor has been found in his stomach. Louis’s brother is only thirty-eight, but the author is told there is no chance he will survive. Eventually their mother is asked for permission to unplug his life support.
What follows is a kind of literary autopsy, charting the downward spiral that led to Louis’s brother’s death. As the author acknowledges in the first pages of Collapse, he became estranged from his brother ten years prior to his death: appalled by his violence, his alcoholism, and his rampant homophobia. Whatever gaps exist in the author’s memory, however, are filled by the interviews he conducts with his brother’s former partners. These women recall his brother’s abuse. But they also shed light on a more multifaceted man: a man capable of outsize generosity and kindness, a man with hopes and dreams, a man whose destiny was not yet set.
Collapse is at its most successful when it allows such contradictions to come to the fore, creating a hall of mirrors in which various different images of the author’s brother are reflected back. A woman named Angelique offers a particularly moving anecdote, in which she remembers waking up to hundreds of Post-it notes stuck all over the house, each one scrawled with the same message: “I love you.” As she tells Louis, “No one had ever done that for me before. . . . Thanks to your brother, I felt important.”
Despite these glimpses of a more complicated figure, the author often reverts to the heavy-handed sociological mode that defines so much of his writing. Ernaux has written of her unwillingness to become complicit with an academic discourse that reduces working-class life to an intellectual fetish. By contrast, Louis is happy to interpolate various theoretical voices into his novel, from Sigmund Freud to Michel Foucault. These writers seem to consolidate the author’s view of his brother as little more than the product of his circumstances. As he writes:
My brother’s life resembled the infinitely repeating image of a body struggling in quicksand, and when he tried to escape he sank. . . . His dreams collided with the reality that was his and hurt him.
Louis would have us believe that his brother’s death is not an event but a form of “destiny.” There never were “dreams” worth aspiring to; after all, the “quicksand’ was always going to catch up.
In his seminal essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin warns of the dangers of mixing literature and “sociology.” As he argues, this kind of writing relies on an overly deterministic view of human behavior. By contrast, the true responsibility of the artist is to harness the power of revelation in order to do justice to the “always inexplicable” form of human experience. In more than one interview, Édouard Louis has cited Baldwin as one of the primary influences. But the difference between the two men could not be greater.
This is not to suggest that Louis is lacking in skill, intelligence, or good intentions. However, in both Collapse and Monique Escapes, the author seems to reduce his own characters to little more than ethnographic tropes: examples of what Baldwin might describe as “life fitted neatly into pegs.” As Louis’s own career continues its upward trajectory — a film adaptation of The End of Eddy is already in development — it is hard not to wonder how sustainable this mode of representation is; or how long it will take for Louis to consider the ways his own work has come to serve the voyeuristic fantasies of a liberal middle-class reader, of the sort he once reviled.