French novelist Édouard Louis has one subject – himself – and two stories to tell about it. The first, painfully recounted in his acclaimed debut, The End of Eddy, published in France when he was 21, concerns his escape from the deprived northern village where he grew up targeted for being gay. His other story, effectively an ongoing multi-part work in progress, concerns the aftermath of writing The End of Eddy, the success of which ejected him from his working-class roots and further frayed the relationships dissected in his memoirs Who Killed My Father and A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, about Louis’s downtrodden mother.
Change, his fifth book, follows him from the ages of 17 to 25, and describes once more his hard-won ascent to fame (“Need I tell you again how it all started?”). Told in the form of a novel, its main addressee is Elena, an upper-middle-class friend he made while studying in Amiens, where he earned a scholarship in his late teens. In her company he learns how to use a knife and fork and hears for the first time the names Modigliani, Wagner and Palestine (“I didn’t even know such a place existed”). Out goes his hoody, in comes a tie; he jogs off 10 kilos, changes his voice with “long hours in front of the mirror”, surgically alters his teeth and hairline, and after attending an inspirational guest lecture by Didier Eribon – a Paris-based philosopher of similar origins – he reads, reads and reads, then writes.
The novel’s emotional punch lies in the ever-present question of how traitorous this transformation feels, and not only to Louis (or “Édouard”, as he is in the book). Elena is cast aside when, having extracted the cultural capital she and her family have to offer, he lights out for Paris seeking hook-ups sizzling with an even deeper sense of betrayal. He’s in imaginary dialogue with his homophobic dad when he reveals that, during sex, “it was you I thought of (in telling you this I’m saying the unspeakable)... [sex with men] was to go beyond the limits of what you considered the most base, the most vile”. He spends Saturdays in the library before hitting the bars on the lookout for anyone who’ll let him stay over: a railwayman “with the smell of grease and metal on his body”; a guy from “an estate reputed to be one of the toughest in France”; CEOs who “travelled only by private jet and spent their entire time in hotels where one night... cost what my whole family earned in a year when I was a child, for a family of seven”.
There’s electric scene-making, but also reckless hyperbole (“only”, “entire”) and wiser-than-thou preening (“the philosopher Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick speaks somewhere of the inexhaustible transformative energy a stigmatised childhood can produce”). Amid the ruthless self-scrutiny, contradictions go unvoiced: while someone’s brusque manners to a waitress at a fancy dinner pricks his class consciousness, he’s also not shy to admit that he fears the “downfall” of having to “work as a cashier at the supermarket like his cousin”. Intrigue lies too in how worried Louis seems to be by the book’s billing as fiction. See the peculiar caveats in this footnote:
“In fact I didn’t go to the lecture with Elena but with another friend... I prefer to substitute Elena for him in the story... so as not to have to retrace the whole series of events that led me to go with him and not with her. Anyway I told Elena every detail, and it was as if she’d been present the whole time, even when she wasn’t.”
Maybe Louis’s purpose is to imply the rest of the book is written as if under oath – and yet some of its most psychologically persuasive passages involve Édouard’s admission that he plays fast and loose with facts. Recounting his childhood neglect to Elena’s horrified mother, he lets us know: “I was exaggerating, not really lying but presenting reality in a way that would disgust her.” (Is this meant to cast The End of Eddy in new light? Either way, it’s worth bearing in mind when, in Change, Édouard, briefly selling sex to pay his dental bills, tells us about a flabby client “sagging or rather oozing to the floor”.)
Away from the questions and doubts, Change’s appeal comes down more straightforwardly to Louis’s knack for dramatising filial strife, an evergreen subject of endless emotional ramifications. Édouard’s mother, lighting a cigarette indoors, finds herself perplexed then infuriated when her son righteously orders her outside, having learned (via Elena) that he’s been passively smoking all his life. The ensuing bust-up is comic and tragic; ditto Édouard’s dawning realisation that his lifelong desire for revenge on his father has given way to desire for vengeance on his behalf. (What’s the old Martin Amis line about never agreeing that someone’s father is a jerk?) But I’m not sure Louis is in a position to see that the power of his story in Change ultimately has little to do with its uniqueness. At one point he tells us: “I hated my childhood and I miss my childhood. Is that normal?” Maybe he’ll find a new subject if he’s able to come up for air to hear the answer.
• Change: A Novel by Édouard Louis, translated by John Lambert, is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
