It has been said that the French wunderkind Édouard Louis suffers for his lack of humour. But for such a famously repetitious writer to call a book Change is at least a bit funny. Louis’s writing up to this point has been monomaniacal in its focus on the psychological and physical violence inflicted on the working classes by the structures of neoliberalism. Change is no different. This latest instalment further demarcates him as exactly what he is: one of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation.
While it is billed as a novel, Change stretches the definition of autofiction to its absolute breaking point. It charts the life of Eddy (later, Édouard) as he tries to escape his working-class origins and refashion himself as an actor, a student, a lover, a radical, a writer; as anything that might put clear water between him and the world into which he was born. The book begins with scenes that will be familiar to anyone who has read Louis’s breakout novel, The End of Eddy, and takes the reader on a journey that ends with the publication of Louis’s breakout novel … The End of Eddy. Plus ça change.
