... articulating tenderness and regret alongside shame and rage ... The frequent shifts from 'you' to 'she' aren’t always easy for a reader to follow, but they convey a woman in motion, alive, as if tracked by a restless lens. Tash Aw’s sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis’s voice: light, yet recursive in a way that propels us forwards, even as it describes suffocating repetition ... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails ... It is difficult to write candidly about a living family member with whom one is on good terms. At times I missed the unchecked anger of The End of Eddy (2017). In its place a tender recognition of the loneliness of class transition emerges, the cost of having given up what is known for what is possible. As a remedy, Louis risks sentimentality in admitting his desire to build for his mother a home in words. Almost like a character in a fairy tale, Monique eventually finds her way to Paris, and even smokes a cigarette with Catherine Deneuve ... At times the text veers into manifesto ... But perhaps Louis is wrong to suggest that literature cannot be political in an indirect way. Stories do inspire shifts in political consciousness, hitting us somewhere deeper than the intellect. To say that a woman has been destroyed by inequality gives us a fact; to demonstrate it is powerful. The richest moments of the book show us personal agency reacting with and against systemic forces, as when mother and son, in a daze of futile hope, send cheques in answer to a marketing letter offering a chance to win €100,000. Lurking under the book’s fairy-tale surface is a nuanced account of desire and belonging, a careful analysis of the tribalism that can keep us tethered to what wears us down, especially when that tribalism is a response to conditions that make class mobility impossible for so many ... treads familiar ground ... Édouard Louis’s excavation of the violence of class, gender and sexual inequality is worth repeating, and it may be a life’s work.
He uses his personal experience to demonstrate the ways women suffer from subordination and masculine domination; and political attacks on his family to show the ways legislation can further denigrate the poor. In essence, Louis’s intimate narrative creates a pathway to understanding the complex, symbiotic nature between systems of power ... There are some sections of this introspective account, however, that could have benefitted from more flesh. While what he does for his mother—encouraging her to leave his father, taking her to fancy French restaurants, and arranging an encounter with a celebrity she admired—is shown, his feelings for her are sparse and somewhat simplistic ... Even though as a fan and ravenous reader of his work I desired a bit more, the slightness of Louis’s book can be seen as radical in itself. Towing the powerhouse that is male privilege, he makes himself smaller than those around him on the shelf and in doing so, we have to work to find him there. Although one could argue that the story of a woman should be much larger than those of her male counterpart, I appreciate and acknowledge the act of solidarity. It remains clear, by this work and others, that Louis is in service to those overlooked by the privileged and an excellent role model for how men can become better allies to women ... In the end, we learn a crucial lesson, one that many might already suspect or know, the message beating from the heart of this book, that male supremacy, ultimately, serves no one.
The material remains painful, yet Louis’s mellowing tone can be seen in how much more gently he portrays the grim details of Monique’s occupation than he did in The End of Eddy, a luridly styled book undeniably out to shock. The heartbreaking details tend to be quieter, often related to a kind of survivor’s guilt as Louis looks back to his mother’s ill-starred attempts to conjure an escape during his childhood ... Remarkably, Louis avoids patronising his mother in all this ... You suspect this uniquely troubling writer is far from done yet.
