The problem with The End of Eddy is the beginning of The End of Eddy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). It has one of those portentous opening sentences �" "From my childhood I have no happy memories." �" that you can try if you're Tolstoy beginning Anna Karenina or Austen Pride and Prejudice, but usually get misremembered. Such as you, the unsuspecting reader, are in fact a stranger, and the book another stranger who sits down next to you on the train, it's not a line that's a conversation-starter.
There's a chance that author Edouard Louis doesn't like it either, because he backs off in the following sentence, by which time you're definitely holding up your book, high, as he begins philosophizing. It's regrettable that Louis, in his debut novel, is stood up by his editor like Eddy is by pretty much everyone who should have nurtured him.
His far better second paragraph begins with a superb sentence, "Two boys appeared in the hallway, the first tall with red hair, and the second short with a hunchback." (This is, after all, a French novel, newly translated into English by Michael Lucey.) It lights the fuse on the gripping story you can piece together from what follows. I say piece together because, while the narrative is linear, to a vexing degree this already short novel reads like Post-its yearning to stick to actual paper, sections dropped into chapters like recitatives and arias driving a dramatically lurching opera.
For those waking up from a Rip Van Winkle cryonic nap, our protagonist is bullied, pretty much constantly, for his effeminacy and what it represents, and it fucks him up. More acutely, he sees that he has a part in it, and that it's more complicated than that some part of him enjoys it, needs it, even plans it. He is, if not unashamed, fully complicit. Yet you like him.
It's not that I don't get Eddy, who comes from a village (his in northern France and far bigger than mine in rural America was, but a village nonetheless) where being gay is a matter raised only in slurs and where he un-athletically walks the balance beam between being seen as someone special, somehow better than his more uncouth fellow citizens �" and the more deplorable for it, putting on all the wrong airs. His basically loving parents are so overwhelmed by their own self-loathing and revulsion at each other that they swing like wrecking balls between accepting and rejecting him. Only the salvaged TVs in every room play on undisturbed.
One hopes that this is a book that saves lives by falling into the hands of younger readers who respond, You too? That said, Eddy is not the poster boy for It Gets Better.
Like Caesar's Gaul, Eddy's France is divided into three parts: home, hood and homohood (the last in an art college in Amiens, not Paris), and they're equally, if differently horrors. The home is such a leaky wreck that Eddy's upper bunk, improbably, crashes down onto his sister's, repeatedly, and what does not reek of Gaulois reeks of pastis, a cheap, sweet booze known as France's second-favorite drink. Second-favorite is the most anyone dares aspire to here, the characters in the hood as unsavory and uncreative in their ways of killing time, and the imagined love interests at art college are cold. The most anyone hopes for is "a little life."
Neither Eddy nor his creator is spared the rampant, lacerating, communal self-pity, or the incessant self-perpetuating, self-defeating rumination on it. Lapsed time and intellectual fashion alone have spared Louis the philosophical dilations of Foucault and the solipicism of Lacan, which would ruin this already separated sauce.
Where Louis finds his voice �" where he adds something to the already vast literature of homophobic bullying �" is in his straightforward depictions of the brutality, its physical immediacy and its emotional aftershocks. The blows and kicks the pair of thugs inflicts, "wrinkling" and "ageing" Eddy's face, pale next to their foul, clinically described spittle, mostly running down his face but memorably landed on his jacket, from which he is forced to eat it. Their nonchalance toward him when, older, he encounters them is perplexing, if less so than the fact that Eddy's routine pommeling at their hands earlier leaves no visible traces, even to the eagle eye of a father who immediately spots the yellow-purple circle around his daughter's slugged eye.
Still, I've yet to read anywhere a better account of the actual deeds of "out in the shed" group boy-sex, the trauma of its in-flagrante discovery by Eddy's mother, and the cruelty of the two "straight" tops snitching on their paired buttboys in public �" at school! �" with shame sticking only to the bottoms.
"Logically speaking [one of the tops] should have been called a faggot too," Louis writes, stepping back out of the frame to interpret. "But the crime was not having done something, it was being something. And, especially, looking like one of them." Those sentences have not left my mind since I read them, so perhaps they're true.