What is most impressive about The End of Eddy is that its author turned himself into a man capable of creating such a vivid and honest self-portrait. Telling the truth about growing up gay among bigoted, bullying people requires bravery and brio; shaping that story into a memorable dramatic narrative takes not only nerve but intelligence, skill and a mysterious jolt of je ne sais quoi. ... Louis is situated now in this line of powerfully, almost scarily, honest gay storytellers who need make nothing up, since their lives — especially their lonely childhoods — provide them with material beyond the scope of the imagination.
What distinguishes The End of Eddy from its autofictional antecedents is the urgency with which Louis seeks to separate himself from his previous self, a desire so intense that the novel can be seen as a kind of wake ... Throughout the novel, Louis catalogues the baffling contradictions of the world of his childhood: brutal racism next to friendliness toward the village’s single person of color; his father’s scorn for the bourgeoisie and his hope that Eddy will join their ranks; the villagers’ hatred of government, which they insist must take action against immigrants and sexual minorities ... The abstractions that Louis deploys can flatten out novelistic texture, rendering invisible any details that they can’t accommodate ... Louis knows that the language of social theory, which requires the kind of education the poor are denied, is complicit in the system that it seeks to make visible. His use of that language in The End of Eddy is freighted with an ambivalence that animates the book and gives it a devastating emotional force. To write the novel is at once an act of solidarity and an act of vengeance.
This arresting autobiographical novel pulls no punches; rather, it lands them on the reader as frequently as fists descend on its subject ... So far, so grim. For anyone who thinks that in contemporary Europe the bad old days are far behind us for young people like Eddy, this is a salutary reminder of just how far from the truth that is ... However, the real achievement of the book is not its reportage, but its attitude. It is written entirely without self pity – and, astonishingly, without judgment ... There is no recoil from the facts, but no sentiment either. In the end, the writing-out of this intolerable childhood comes across as courageous, necessary and deeply touching.
Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy is the Hillbilly Elegy of France ... For anyone interested in learning about the white underclass that’s helped power the populist movements of Europe, it is an excellent and accessible place to begin ... The End of Eddy, however, is not just a remarkable ethnography. It is also a mesmerizing story about difference and adolescence, one that is far more realistic than most.
Louis' account of growing up gay and poor in a working-class village isn't only a story about France. Just released in a highly readable translation by Michael Lucey, this painfully insightful tale of entrapment and escape could've easily been set in Michigan or West Virginia ... While Eddy's parents are both vivid characters — Louis has a great ear for their patois — what makes the novel special is the way it expands outward. Louis shows how his parents' values have been shaped by a profound sense of powerlessness shared with their neighbors in the village of Hallencourt, a blue-collar community bleak with unemployment, alcoholism, violence, racism and a deadening sense that life goes nowhere ... like so many people who feel abused by our globalized world, they were merely passing the abuse along.
The book, a slender thing but no more slender than it needs to be, sets off at a brisk gallop and never lets up ... Louis’ tone throughout is as measured as a coroner’s in depicting the ways that the villagers of Picardy boast of being independent and untamable while tethering themselves to the dismal perpetuation of racist attitudes and destructive ignorance ... Everywhere there’s tension between a 'simple' pastoral surface and the crushing conformist mentality hiding behind it. Breugel’s ironic, enigmatic landscapes, dating from the 1500s, capture this tension and can still make one shudder with familiarity. The End of Eddy has a similar, haunting power.
Louis’s novel goes down not like cod-liver oil but whiskey. What a relief to leave the other pundit-prescribed books wilting on the bedside table in exchange for a novel that scorches and seethes ... Louis offers a candid psychological portrait that shines with exact, if at times excessive, detail ... The novel’s sociological thrust guards against the self-absorption that mars some autofiction. In its attention to the village and its inhabitants, the novel traces how we exist, and are produced, socially.
Although it explores a childhood in a northern France blighted by poverty, misery, and prejudice...it is not a return home during a middle age tempered by literary success; it is not replete with emotion recollected in tranquility. It is written in the white heat of recent experience … Louis paints his narrator not only as a fearful victim of violence and poverty, but also, in his dreams, as a ‘class renegade,’ as he set about adopting values ‘precisely in order to construct a self in opposition to my parents, in opposition to my family.’ His parents thus were raising not only a homosexual, but also a class traitor … But his own homosexuality and his own class origins belong to him as a gift that he can bestow with a mixture of relish and cold rage on his fellow citizens … Louis enacts a sort of homecoming as he offers his compatriots a new version of their country.
At once a Künstlerroman and a coming-out narrative, The End of Eddy tracks the intellectual and sexual becoming of a boy whose flamboyance, whose ‘fancy ways’ and ‘queeny gestures,’ place him at odds with the conservative ethos of his village, locking him in a struggle between his organic nature and the expectation that he will replicate, in both demeanor and life ambition, the men he grew up around … Louis has a genius for showing how poverty can wear down the human mind. It drains his family members of any excess tenderness; it forces them into increasingly twisted contortions of justification … Eddy has his eyes on the world outside this narrow realm, and his desire to flee seems almost borne of his sexuality, as though being gay and being an ‘arrogant class renegade,’ as he calls himself, were mutually generating phenomena.
...this concise novel adroitly captures the downstream effects of reactionary rural culture, heightened by the rise of hard-right ideology and the destabilization of the working class in contemporary Europe, granting its reader an extraordinary portrait of trauma and escape.
The best moments of this good though certainly dispiriting book are those in which we sense that better things await the protagonist in a world far beyond his window.
The events in the book, as the author Édouard Louis has recounted in several interviews, are all true, and they are also terrifying ... The intimate drama of Eddy’s struggle vis-à-vis his sexuality is set against a larger landscape of constraint and claustrophobia that we rarely reflected in literature on or about France ... At the end of The End of Eddy, as all though life itself, there is no complete self-acceptance, no final liberation; for Eddy and for everyone, the struggle to love oneself is always contradictory and never complete.
