From the bottom up

The End of Eddy. By Edouard Louis. Translated by Michael Lucey. Harvill Secker; 192 pages; £12.99. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May; $25.

“YOU don’t get all that used to pain really,” writes Edouard Louis about the perpetually sore hands and stiff joints of a cousin who worked as a supermarket checkout girl. Although this autobiographical novel, by a French writer who is still only 24, has stirred a whirlwind of controversy about truth and fiction, class and sexuality, it never moves far from the ordeal of sheer physical suffering.

Eddy Bellegueule—his birth name translates as “Eddy Prettymug”—grows up as a bullied misfit amid the post-industrial underclass of Hallencourt, in northern France. Cursed as a “faggot”, Eddy, “the odd boy in the village”, is repeatedly brutalised both at home and at school. In vain, he tries to fit in, pretending to have a taste for football, girls, even for homophobia, until escape becomes “the only option left to me”. In this culture where male violence appears “natural, self-evident”, Eddy’s father not only terrorises his family but himself. He suffers excruciating back pain that leaves him “screaming in [the] bedroom” and drives him from his job at a brass foundry. Everywhere, “masculine neglect” in families that have dropped out of steady employment means that these “tough guys” inflict the worst violence on their own bodies. They suffer drunk-driving accidents, chronic pain, untreated injuries and “alcohol-induced comas”. One forgotten man even “died in his own excrement”. In fighting and abuse, agony begets agony.

A bestseller when it came out in France in 2014, “The End of Eddy” triggered a very French critical skirmish. By this time, Mr Louis had changed his name and gone on to shine at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Did the book betray Eddy’s stricken family as his growing attraction to boys rather than girls “transformed my whole relationship with the world”? Does this narrative of hell in Hallencourt, at once visceral and cerebral, demonise the so-called Lumpenproletariat, or depict tragic victims trapped in roles “both imposed by social forces ... and also consciously assumed”? A disciple of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, Mr Louis denounces the “class violence” of inequality and opposes the tide of right-wing populism that has swept through such abandoned communities. Michael Lucey’s translation conveys both the scorching sorrow and the cool intelligence of a book that—half-misery memoir, half-radical tract—finds a voice for so much pain. The scapegoat of Hallencourt has become its spokesman.