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.