The New Yorker: Growing Up Poor and Queer in a French Village

Since it was published in France, in 2014, “The End of Eddy,” Édouard Louis’s slim début novel, has sold more than three hundred thousand copies. Much of the extraordinary interest in the book has centered on its depiction of Hallencourt, a village of about fourteen hundred people in Picardy, in the north of France, not far from the sea. Hallencourt’s occasional beauty—fruit trees in gardens, explosions of color in the autumn woods—does little, in Louis’s telling, to alleviate the human suffering that takes place there. A post-industrial decline has shuttered most of the region’s factories, and jobs are scarce and hard. Children in the village leave school early; women have children young; one in five adults has difficulty reading and writing. Alcoholism is rampant and violence casual.

The village overwhelmingly votes for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front, and, as France has braced itself for the possibility of a Le Pen Presidency, Louis’s book has become the subject of political discussion in a way that novels rarely do. (In the first round of the current Presidential election, Le Pen received nearly twice as many votes in Hallencourt as any other candidate.) For Louis, the tide of populism sweeping Europe and the United States is a consequence of what he, citing the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, calls “the principle of the conservation of violence.” “When you’re subjected to endless violence, in every situation, every moment of your life,” Louis told an interviewer, referring to the indignities of poverty, “you end up reproducing it against others, in other situations, by other means.” [...]

Queerness is the key that springs Eddy from the various cycles—of poverty, of alcoholism, of violence—that he sees as determining life in the village. “Being attracted to boys transformed my whole relationship to the world,” he writes, “encouraging me to identify with values that were different from my family’s.” This doesn’t mean that queerness represents freedom; it’s an “unknown force that got hold of me at birth and that imprisoned me in my own body.” While his parents regard his mannerisms as a choice, “some personal aesthetic project that I was pursuing to annoy them,” Louis considers not only his desires but also elements of cultural style often coded as queer to be corporeal, determined in and by the body: “I had not chosen my way of walking, the pronounced, much too pronounced, way my hips swayed from side to side, or the shrill cries that escaped my body—not cries that I uttered but ones that literally escaped through my throat whenever I was surprised, delighted, or frightened.”

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