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”.
