Edouard Louis: It’s a hard knock life

This book — an autobiographical novel called En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy over here) — has barged into the literary world with a thwack of its own. Published in France two years ago, it caused an instant uproar and had immediate success, selling more than 300,000 copies and counting. Since then, Louis has become a phenomenon: compared to Karl Ove Knausgard, feted by Toni Morrison (his heroine). The novel is finally published here next month, but in the meantime Louis has released a sequel in France. Its title is A History of Violence.

We meet in a cafe at the end of the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris, a few hundred yards from where Sartre and Beauvoir are buried. The link isn’t so tenuous: Louis speaks admiringly of both authors, who, like him, wrote a provocative, engaged literature furiously attuned to its time. It’s too soon to speak of heirs and mantles, but the thin, pale young man in front of me, talking a mile a minute with a sweet, nervous energy, is unembarrassed to fight on similar terrain. In The End of Eddy, he pulls no punches in portraying his familiars’ racism and homophobia, their anger and their boredom, their lack of comfort and hope — and in indicting the system that, he believes, created it all.

As if that weren’t enough, there is the intrigue of the author himself. The book’s French title literally means To Have Done with Eddy Bellegueule. This was his original name; he became Edouard Louis in 2012. “Eddy, for me, is a child I’ve killed,” he says. “I killed him off because he was dead already.”

What he means — and what his book describes — is how the young Eddy is systematically attacked and rejected by the only world he knows. The End of Eddy is called a novel, but only in order to acknowledge that it is a “literary construct”, its author says; it is autobiography by any other name. He draws a sad portrait of life in Picardy, north of Paris, marked by neglect, abuse and poverty. Eddy is gay, and this causes many of his woes: his parents are ashamed and his schoolmates unforgiving. But this wound exposes a host of other injustices underneath. He tells the story of both one boy and of a whole class, one forgotten not only by literary circles, but by society in general. As 2016 proved, though, you ignore them at your peril — a lesson France may soon learn, too. The presidential elections loom in April; in Eddy/Louis’s home village, a good half vote National Front.

“I had editors who told me, ‘We’re not going to publish this book because nobody lives in such poverty in France,’” Louis says. “All those editors who grew up in the 5th arrondissement, went to the top universities, then straight into the big publishing houses…” Many couldn’t believe the squalor Eddy grows up in, and, on publication, a swarm of journalists descended on his former village to see if the conditions he described were true.

His mother, ashamed more than anything at being called poor, contested his portrayal; he, in turn, published pictures of their old home on his website. “It’s not so much that people don’t want to talk about [the poverty] — they just don’t know it exists. As soon as you tell them about it, it seems exaggerated. But for me, the first time I went to the Luxembourg Garden and saw all the bourgeoises dressed in Chanel, that seemed exaggerated, too!”

Louis admits frankly that he “hated” books when he was little: “You saw one, and it was the symbol of everything you’d never have.” There were no books at home, just four televisions, repurposed from scrapheaps, dotted around the family house, which had holes in the walls and no proper doors. Five children lived there, plus a father on unemployment benefits and a mother not allowed to work by her macho husband. For Eddy’s father, books are “for queers”. “We knew that literature didn’t talk about us, that the world didn’t talk about us,” his son says.

This is why Louis wrote the book: to do some of that talking. The story takes us up to Eddy’s escape, aged 14, when he gets a scholarship (specialising in theatre) at a lycée in nearby Amiens and moves out. Eddy/Louis eventually gained a place at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris; he wrote the novel between the ages of 18 and 20, and it was published when he was 21. Yet he is eager to dispel the myth of the child prodigy, the innate outsider (“like Billy Elliot”). He wants to emphasise that he did not reject his familiars — they rejected him. “The whole story of the book is a desperate attempt by a little boy not to be different. The novel is the story of a failure.”

CLEARLY, this is no romance. A regular accusation against portrayals of the working class is that they sink into sentimentality or agitprop. Louis was keen to avoid both, and the “myth-making and mystification” of the less fortunate that artists have been guilty of through time. (He cites the film director Pasolini and the writer Genet.) He is indignant that you have to make the working classes seem particularly nice or noble to gain sympathy for their condition. He says this is “very bourgeois”, and that what he’s doing is something more radical — simply sympathising with them on principle.

“I want to defend prisoners’ conditions in prison,” he shrugs. “It doesn’t mean I want to dine with prisoners every night.” He can say it: his cousin went to prison; his grandfather was locked up, too.

The person I meet today seems to blend in happily with his classically Parisian surroundings, bar that nervy vim; little betrays how far he has come. Yet his metamorphosis was hard. His new friends advised him to get reading. He would cry his way through the pages, bewildered by what he was encountering. One book, by the sociologist Didier Eribon, struck a chord: it described the author’s not dissimilar path from working-class provincial to writer in Paris.

“From that moment on, I decided I had to change my life, so I changed everything — my first name, my surname. I threw all my clothes in the bin and bought clothes that seemed more bourgeois. I would put on a tie every day, to go to school, or to the bakery where I worked.” He laughs. “It was grotesque! It was violent. But I wasn’t thinking, I was fleeing.”

He would stand in front of the mirror and practise speaking, training himself to lose his Picardy accent. “I told myself, ‘If I want this to be my life, I have to act it first.’ The theatre helped me a lot. It allowed me to tell myself, ‘If you want to become something, you have to play it.’”

Perhaps some of the initial incredulity was spurred by his names, almost too perfect for the parts. He was Eddy, not Edouard, because the French working class are often fascinated by American culture (his brother is Andy); Bellegueule is a near-Dickensian surname meaning “nice gob” or “pretty boy”. The name Edouard Louis nods to more bourgeois and literary interests. Naturally, his parents hated the change, taking it as a direct affront, but he can’t regret it. “The book is also about the right to create oneself — but of course, all this just built a greater distance between me and my parents.”

His case, then, throws up perennial questions: a writer who regularly repeats his insistence on telling “the truth”, but who has rewritten his life; who speaks for the working class, but has reinvented himself among the bourgeoisie. Yet he hasn’t denied his past, he has opened it up for all to see.

If anything, this is even more acute in A History of Violence, where he describes a rape he endured one Christmas in Paris. He reported it, but the police did little about it until he spoke of it in a bestseller. This created another brouhaha, as a man widely identified as the culprit tried to sue Louis for besmirching his name; the case collapsed and there has been no conviction for the rape. Louis is unrepentant: “When you start an autobiographical project, you run risks — but I’ve found that the profits, the chance to say something about the world, are greater still.”

So does he fit in, in his new world? “Not quite,” he says softly. “Not quite.” He still has contact with his family, but it is fraught with misunderstandings and frustrations. There was one nice surprise: his book-hating father was inordinately proud when The End of Eddy came out. He bought 20 copies and gave them to all his friends. Yet his son balks when I ask if they feel like his family.

“I don’t know. It’s a hard question,” he sighs. “I don’t think I can say I love my mother, for example. I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. But that doesn’t stop me being infuriated by the conditions she lives in.” Not for the first time, and surely not for the last, he promptly powers from the personal to the political; hardly a stretch, because for him they are one and the same.

“If my mother is my family or not, who knows? But when I see her, I want to write about her. I want to write things that could change her life. She’s the one who says to me, ‘Nobody talks about us.’ But, you know — it’s always complicated.”

The End of Eddy (Harvill Secker £12.99) is out on Feb 2