This garçon’s life
Marcel Proust had his madeleine soaked in tea to launch him on his search for time lost. Eddy Bellegueule, the young, yearning soul and punchingbag protagonist of French author Édouard Louis’ bruising autobiographical novel, “The End of Eddy,” has the persistent memory of his middle school classmate’s hot sputum dripping down his face to remind him of a time and experience he couldn’t forget if he wanted to. Yet that memory, repellent and vividly rendered in Louis’ prose, is meaningful to Eddy, cherished almost: It’s from that, and other harsher experiences, that he’s forced to forge his way toward some kind of freedom.
The book, a slender thing but no more slender than it needs to be, sets off at a brisk gallop and never lets up. Within the confines of its short first chapter, it’s revealed that Eddy is gay, which is something, at the tender age of 10, he’s dimly aware of, if only to the extent that it frightens him; that Eddy’s father is a violent alcoholic; that Eddy’s grandfather was also a violent alcoholic; that both men dropped out of school to go to work at a local factory; that Eddy lives with his family among the working poor; and that Eddy, when he finally escapes to the École Normale, will lie to his classmates about his upbringing in a fumbling attempt to fit in and belong. To pass.
This notion of fitting in is central to “The End of Eddy.” Accepted gender expectations of masculinity and toughness have shaped the generations of men in Eddy’s village. Yet while these men refuse to “conform to school discipline” and instead drop out at young ages, they conform unwittingly to class expectations by lining up to take their place in a continuum of violence, alcoholism and ruined futures. It’s also understood that a woman’s place among such men is limited at best. As depicted by Louis, women in his village have children “in order to become women.” If they’re childless by a certain age, it’s chalked up to their being “gay or frigid.” Nobody ever appears to rebel. Louis’ tone throughout is as measured as a coroner’s in depicting the ways that the villagers of Picardy boast of being independent and untamable while tethering themselves to the dismal perpetuation of racist attitudes and destructive ignorance.
Another concern troubling both the younger and older Eddy is complicity. When the bullying he’s subjected to first begins, Eddy discovers a sanctuary space for himself within the school, but it soon becomes the private place where bullies attack him. Yet Eddy returns to his refuge despite knowing what will happen, not to make a show of fearlessness but “to keep other kids from thinking of him as someone who gets beaten up.” Louis, years after the fact, still wonders if he was a collaborator in his own abuse, wonders “what the boundaries are that separate complicity from active participation, from innocence, from carelessness, from fear.” And in the context of this book, one easily wonders by extension about the other people in Eddy’s village as well. Were they complicit in their own cycles of abuse? And if this abuse was the air they breathed, the only kind of life they’d ever known, then how could they ever get enough perspective to recognize it?
Eddy, of course, painfully, humiliatingly tries to conform to these wretched standards. In the book’s second section, when Eddy is caught by his mother in a shed having sex with his older cousin — playing “man and woman” — along with two other boys, his scandal goes public. As a countermeasure, he briefly and very publicly dates a couple of girls from school. And while his so-called buddies weakly applaud his efforts, it’s understood by all that Eddy is, in fact, gay. That he had sex with his cousin. That his dating these girls changes nothing. As Louis so devastatingly puts it, “the crime was not having done something, it was being something.”
Beyond the mention of a videocassette or a television or a moped, there are few incursions of the modern to speak of in the book, giving the story an unmoored, atemporal quality. Louis also writes about the coexistence of basic country pleasures gleaned from the bucolic landscape; walks in the woods, fresh milk from a farm, autumn chestnuts. Chestnuts, which later become ammunition in organized fights. Everywhere there’s tension between a “simple” pastoral surface and the crushing conformist mentality hiding behind it. Bruegel’s ironic, enigmatic landscapes, dating from the 1500s, capture this tension and can still make one shudder with familiarity. “The End of Eddy” has a similar, haunting power.