LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing books that have made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any book that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
One of the joys of editing this series is the diverse content our writers bring to the table. This content includes many titles I’ve never read and other titles I wouldn’t have necessarily considered “LGBT literature” at first glance. And then there are books that definitely are LGBT literature, but also have enormous political and cultural importance beyond the LGBT themes. The End of Eddy counts as one of those books. I confess that, until I read the review that you’re about to read, I had never even heard of the book. The author, Édouard Louis, is French and writing about working-class France. Comparisons have been made to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—whereas Vance writes about Trumpland, Louis writes about Le Pen country. However, the review that you will read challenges this simple comparison.
This month’s LGBT Literature writer is Charles O’Malley, known on Daily Kos as cwbo. He has asked me to to publish his review of The End of Eddy—everything below the fold is the work of Mr. O’Malley, who has given me permission to publish it. He will, however, try to be online after publication to answer any questions and respond to comments. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this review as much as I did. I, for one, have added The End of Eddy to my reading list.
Now, without further ado...
Édouard Louis does not shy away from despair. His debut novel, The End of Eddy (En Finir Avec Eddy Bellegueule) begins with the statement: “From my childhood I have no happy memories.” This story is neither happy nor pleasant, and its characters are neither happy nor pleasant folk. On the novel’s second page the narrator, who shares the author’s name, recalls his father packing the family cat’s litter of kittens into a plastic grocery bag and swinging it against the side of the house until “the bag was filled with blood and the meowing ceased.” In the second chapter, he describes the death of his mother’s first husband and the body’s decomposition; the corpse remained undiscovered for long enough for bugs to eat through his cheek to reveal his jaw bone. Later in the book, the narrator recalls the discovery of the body of a loner in his small factory village in the northeast of France, who one day lost the will to live and decided to die in his own piss and excrement. His clothing had fused to his skin by the time curious teenage boys found his corpse. They spoke of a smell “like something died,” not knowing the accuracy of their claim. These moments of grotesque action are matched in their intensity by Louis’s descriptions of the violence endemic to his village. This is a violence enacted by men upon their wives, parents upon their children, lovers upon their beloved, and straights upon queers. All of this is to say: the powerful upon the powerless.
And yet, despite the poverty, anguish, and fear in which young Eddy came of age, and despite the relentless trauma that he experiences in his youth, The End of Eddy does not present childhood, especially the specific queer and solitary childhood that it relates, as pain alone. The book does not ascribe to a conventional narrative model of a gay child fighting to get out of a tough childhood, finally emerging victorious into the arms of compassionate, erudite urbanites. Nor does the book vilify those who torture queer kids. While not excusing abusers, The End of Eddy presents a place in which children grow and some survive, in which some leave and some repeat the tradition of violence, in which killing a bagful of kittens in front of your children is a routine act. Here, an act of pity is just as random as an act of violence. The End of Eddy is not told chronologically, but rather in short episodes; events seem to occur as Eddy remembers them, so at a certain point a reader may wonder if his stories of childhood misery will ever end. This structure replicates the uncertainty of a child: the doubt that adulthood will ever come, that the unhappiness of youth will ever give way to hope.
The End of Eddy was published in France in 2014, when Louis was twenty-two, and has since been translated into twenty languages. Michael Lucey’s English translation appeared in 2017. Louis calls the book fiction, though he also says that every event in the novel is true. His father insisted that he be called Eddy because he thought the name sounded like that of an American television action hero. Like his protagonist, Louis was born with the last name Bellegueule, which Lucey says sounds to French ears like “beautiful mug.” Eddy thinks that both names imply a tough, working-class, traditionally masculine ideal, one that he never managed to fit, despite his years of attempts.
If all the events of the novel really did happen, as Louis has said, and since the novel’s central character’s name is the same as the author’s given name, then how can we call The End of Eddy fiction? And why does Louis call it this? For legal reasons? Neither Eddy’s village nor his family come off well in the novel; surely they weren’t thrilled to read this book. Can an author call true events fiction if he chooses to, and if so, what does he risk? Does it really matter to the book’s story-telling whether its readers believe it to be truth or fantasy? How does that change the reading of the book?
Eddy is the only character in the book with a first and last name. His cousins, friends, and teachers have first names only, and members of Eddy’s nuclear family have no names at all. For most of the novel, this device works, though scenes between his two sisters confuse. He only ever calls his town “the village,” avoiding specificity. However, if one can read veracity into the people and events of the novel, one can also identify the village as the town in which Louis grew up: Hallencourt in Hauts-de-France. And Hallencourt comes off as a desperate, violent place.
The adult Eddy, who narrates the novel, never excuses the physical and emotional violence of his father. Yet, he understands the cyclical nature of parental abuse. He sees the sins of his grandfather, an even more abusive man, visited upon his father. He also understands that his father’s great pain (an accident years ago left his back wrecked) is made no better by his strenuous factory work. Louis as narrator does not judge—perhaps he has left that job for us, sad readers. Further, the adult Eddy understands why his mother makes excuses for her husband’s behavior and his wretched treatment of her. He understands that she thinks, as time goes on, that she is of insufficient virtue and as such she deserves the abuse that she receives: physical, emotional, and sexual.
The adult Eddy also knows that his family’s poverty exacerbated his father’s violence. Had he accessible healthcare his back might not have always been in constant pain. Had he a full stomach, he might not lash out constantly (Eddy recalls dinners of only milk, and his mother sending him to the grocery store alone, for a child could buy on credit when the cashier knew that the mother was not good for it). If his house had basic fixtures—doors between rooms, windows with glass rather than cardboard taped together, ceilings that kept out rain—his father might not have sought others to blame.
Eddy’s parents raised him to blame foreigners for the economic problems of his village. As a child, his mother told him that though they were poor, at least they were better than the Arabs. “Damn towelheads,” he remembers his father saying about a news story, “It’s like we’re not even in France anymore, we’re in Africa.” His parents tell him not to trust his school’s guidance counselor because she is Martinican. When he takes the train alone to Amiens, the closest city, he is nervous, as he expected “a gang of Arabs to appear at every station and steal all [his] belongings.” Once there, each time he saw a person of color, he’d flood with fear and cross the street. Eddy the child does not understand his learned racism, and Édouard the writer tries to understand it.
In a recent article for the New York Times published just prior to the French presidential election’s run-off, Louis recalls the excitement of his father when Jean-Marie Le Pen, father to Marine and her predecessor in the National Front, made the run-off in 2002. “We’re going to win!” he said while watching the returns. Louis tries to explain why his father so loved Jean-Marie Le Pen: unions had left him behind. The Left had left him behind. The bourgeoisie and the politicians had certainly left him behind. Louis remembers his father hoping for an expulsion of “the Arabs and Jews” from France and capital punishment for homosexuals.
Louis stresses that, if one wishes to convince Le Pen voters—like those in his family—of the menace of her movement, “it’s not enough to show [them] that she is racist and dangerous: Everyone knows that already. It’s not enough to fight against hate or against her. We have to fight for the powerless, for a language that gives a place to the most invisible people—people like my father.”
The End of Eddy, appearing in U.S. bookstores the year that Trump took office, may be a helpful tool for Americans to understand Le Pen’s France (and other sites of xenophobic nationalistic populism), but it is unwise to use Le Pen’s France as a tool to understand The End of Eddy. This book is a story about an individual first, and about his community second. Louis writes the village and its inhabitants only as they relate to Eddy: as they affect him, as he sees them, and as he remembers them.
I urge readers of this review not to think of The End of Eddy as solely a companion to works about the rise of far-right populism like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, as American print media might have you think (reviews for NPR and the New York Times linked the two books). This does a disservice to the book and its project. The End of Eddy finds closer kin in works of fiction that describe the inalienable pain of queerness in a heterosexual world. Reading the novel, I recalled Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, which tells a similar story about growing up queer, this one in working-class Buffalo. Like Eddy, Stone Butch Blues also blurred fiction and memoir. Its protagonist—a stand-in for Feinberg—also faced tremendous violence. In the French tradition, Eddy may find its closest relations in the fiction of Jean Genet; The Thief’s Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers come to mind. Eddy’s remembrances of his family, his poverty, and his depression all relate back to an alienation caused by his queerness. For the child Eddy, his father’s hatred of queer people affected his adolescence far more than his vote for the National Front did.
In the book’s brief epilogue, the narrator’s voice changes drastically. The reason for this, a matter of plot, I shall not reveal here. In the epilogue, Eddy the narrator—and, of course, Édouard the writer—abandons formal grammar and typical punctuation. Lines break and sentences become fragments. Life and language turn abstract. It is here that Eddy and Édouard mature. Eddy becomes Édouard, which, you’ll remember, was never his given name. The book’s epigraph comes from Duras, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein: “for the first time my name said out loud names nothing.” Nothing—an abstract absence—do we here see negative space as a force as powerful as positive space? Here, in this final, short chapter, the book fulfills the promise of its epigraph, and for the reader who has made the journey, and for Édouard, who has relived his trauma in his pages, it is, for the first instance in the book, a happy occasion.
Charles O’Malley is an MFA candidate at the Yale School of Drama.
----------
If you would like to contribute to the LGBT Literature series, please comment below or send me a kosmail. Here is our upcoming schedule:
December 31: Chrislove
January 28: Brecht
February 25: Chitown Kev
March 25: OPEN
April 29: OPEN
----------
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule: