Millennials and Gen Zers (Louis himself is a Millennial) are sometimes derided for being self-obsessed. This assessment dovetails with a common criticism of autobiographical fiction, which holds that such work is inherently solipsistic. Louis’ oeuvre, and Change in particular, offers a pointed response by demonstrating the value of writing about one’s personal experiences. By the end of the book, Louis has achieved a deeper understanding of himself, entirely facilitated by his narrative reorganization of his past. In his characteristically inimitable manner, Louis seems to be asking his readers to consider the radical notion that their memories are theirs to use as they please.
Beautiful politics and beautiful prose tend to pull in opposite directions. Political theory, aiming for totalizing truth, flattens the specificity that enlivens novels, and a bland political and academic pall can dull the spikiness of Louis’s writing ... Too many characters in this novel never become real, reduced to figureheads and helpmeets ... In place of vivid characters, we get unended Eddy, and even his appeal is hazy. ... It may be that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. But his cycle of novelistic purgation suggests a double bind: that those who remember it too well are doomed to repeat it, too.
Change’s appeal comes down more straightforwardly to Louis’s knack for dramatising filial strife, an evergreen subject of endless emotional ramification ... I’m not sure Louis is in a position to see that the power of his story in Change ultimately has little to do with its uniqueness. At one point he tells us: 'I hated my childhood and I miss my childhood. Is that normal?' Maybe he’ll find a new subject if he’s able to come up for air to hear the answer.
The book ends not with triumph, but on a note of exhaustion and resignation. It is this that gives Change its lasting power: the realisation that a hero’s journey only makes sense if the hero has a home to return to, and while a person might be capable of receiving love ... Louis is a divisive writer, and Change will ensure he remains so. It will be too didactic for some, closer to the polemic than the poetic. For others, his political insight will not go far enough, veering as it occasionally does towards the paternalistic. For this reader, however, it has simply served as a reminder of how lucky we are to have him, a writer who relentlessly chronicles the type of lives that are lived by so many but rendered by so few.
One begins to suspect that Louis returns so frequently to the scenes of his childhood, to the stories of his parents, not to soften his previous critiques but for the sheer sake of return and the relief it offers. New angles seem like pretext; his pen feels surest on the old terrain, requires it.
Elegant ... Anyone who has ever felt unseen will understand what he means when he writes of "the beautiful violence of being torn away, of having a chance at freedom" and will savor this candid novel.
Louis’ storytelling, in Lambert’s deft translation, is clear and intellectually robust but captures a tone of fear and anxiety; what he often calls 'revenge,' even on a family that might deserve it, is a corrosive feeling. A sharp chronicle of status climbing and its consequences.
