Readers of Louis, who is 29 – he has published five best-selling novels in France, this is his fourth – will know his blend of tenderness and anger, sentiment and intellect, and above all, formal ingenuity: each of his books is different from the last. in how it makes its narrative way. The first, “The End of Eddy,” was composed of short essays that weaved in and out of direct chronology, but focused on the way Louis, a female boy who was gay, was relentlessly bullied and beaten by everyone he knew, family or not ; the second, “History of Violence,” was a wiretap, with Louis listening in as his sister told her husband about the brutal rape Louis had suffered, a brilliant piece of formal indirection that dramatized the indecency of listening to such stories, the prudishness that Louis felt when he told his own.
The latest novel can be understood as the second panel of a diptych that began with Louis’ “Who Killed My Father” – his father a man who is literally very much alive, but whose alcoholism, racism and anti-Semitism and eventual disability after a factory accident are a patrimony. that, in Louis’s sympathetic view of his largely unsympathetic father, could not be denied. Each novel in the diptych is barely 100 pages, but in both, out of the mundane horror of ignorance, poverty and fear, a transformation takes place for the parents, war reaching varieties of muted peace. A father unable to bear his son’s “royal gestures” and “fancy manners” becomes, in old age, one of Louis’ appreciative readers; a mother who couldn’t leave Louis’s father finally does, and starts a new life in Paris, where, unexpectedly, so much changes that she can say – in a beautiful scene – that Catherine Deneuve came to visit her.
But these two small books, especially “A Woman’s Battles and Transformations,” also exhibit a less attractive feature of Louis’s romanistic practice, one that has been around all along, a sort of 40-watt intellectual bombast:
“I’ve been told that literature should never resemble a representation of feelings, but I write only to bring out emotions, those feelings that the body cannot express.”
“I am told that literature should never resemble a political manifesto, but I am sharpening all my senses as I would sharpen the blade of a knife.”