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.
At its heart is an interrogation of the pernicious logic that underpins so-called social mobility. Touted as liberatory by politicians of various stripes since the 1980s, in practice what social mobility policies have amounted to is an acceptance that to succeed means to leave and that while it might be possible to rise out of your social class, it is totally out of the question to rise with it. When Louis writes of not knowing what to say to his own parents – “we no longer spoke the same language … everything I had gone through had separated us” – he captures this cleaving plainly and precisely. It is a cleaving in both senses of the word; the act of separation and the act of clinging on.
It is fitting that Édouard gets his first glimpse of a different life through acting, realising that his talent for drama could allow him to go to school elsewhere and begin the process of ingratiating himself with the middle class; shaping himself in their image, altering his manners and speech and, tellingly, shrinking his body via restriction and control. There is a particularly heartbreaking scene in which the young Édouard practises a new laugh in the mirror. The laugh, “one more in keeping with my new life”, is quieter and more restrained, Édouard having recently observed that it is considered uncouth to give oneself over fully and unselfconsciously to joy. Throughout Change, Louis describes this early escape as being driven by a desire for revenge, over his past humiliations, over the people and places that shaped his childhood. That desire for revenge serves a purpose – it is fuel to get things moving – but in the end revenge alone is dirty petrol, and it will run your car right off the road.
The book ends not with triumph, but on a note of exhaustion and resignation. It is this that gives Change its lasting power: the realisation that a hero’s journey only makes sense if the hero has a home to return to, and while a person might be capable of receiving love, a persona is only ever capable of receiving praise. In the final reckoning, Édouard reasons that it is “time to go home and sleep”, leaving the reader to ponder what all the struggle has amounted to. A different bed, in a different city, a different face and a different way to make ends meet, a life undoubtedly more comfortable but still riven with violence and alienation, fighting “for a happiness never attained”.
Louis is a divisive writer, and Change will ensure he remains so. It will be too didactic for some, closer to the polemic than the poetic. For others, his political insight will not go far enough, veering as it occasionally does towards the paternalistic. For this reader, however, it has simply served as a reminder of how lucky we are to have him, a writer who relentlessly chronicles the type of lives that are lived by so many but rendered by so few.
• Change 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.
