That Ernaux can do so much — The Young Man tackles love, aging, desire, loss, misogyny, class and death — in such a small space is clearly the hallmark of a writer who has honed her craft to be razor sharp. It cuts to the bone.
The Young Man is, quite literally, a bit thin ... But [it] does offer a taste of what’s so unique and astonishing about her honesty, her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her narratives.
A romance on its face, The Young Man gathers singularity and texture as an account of manifold transits: between youth and age, living and dying, in and out of passion, passing through menopause, and from Ernaux’s impoverished beginnings through her ascension into the literary bourgeoisie ... Ernaux, in turn, intermixes these ensouled sediments with the specters of the personal—her memories, the stuff of one woman’s experience.
Like many of her books, it shows how sex and writing are intertwined for Ernaux, the one compelling—or sometimes impeding—the other ... Although the book itself doesn’t quite feel complete—it’s about 40 pages, with large font and ample white space—it’s clear that, through writing it, Ernaux has achieved some understanding of this brief, surprising affair ... Though cooler in tone and smaller in scope, The Young Man could be said to continue a story that began with Simple Passion ... For longtime readers of Ernaux, intimately familiar with each of these episodes, reading this brief biography is uncanny and even a bit disappointing, like reading a plot summary of Proust.
Despite Ernaux’s efforts to demonstrate the significance of the liaison, this diminutive book seems slight. She never delivers. She’s holding out on us, obscuring subjective experience with silly details like the man’s taste in music (The Doors!) and lousy table manners (he chops up his spaghetti).
Reading The Young Man in the context of Ernaux’s other works can feel disorienting—sometimes even like a betrayal. Where is the seventeen-year-old who was consumed by the older camp counselor’s desire? The university student scrambling to get an illegal abortion? The woman waiting helplessly by the phone for S.’s call? While Ernaux made formal innovations to capture and challenge the lack of agency she experienced in these situations, in The Young Man, Ernaux makes the choices—and often seems to revel in her newfound power ... Ernaux seems not to be driven by passion or devotion, but by a kind of artistic curiosity ... perhaps The Young Man shows us these understandings of life are not mutually exclusive. After we peel back the narratives that we spin subconsciously, those stories that are shaped by external forces—whether capricious lovers or restrictive laws—maybe we are free to craft new ones, to purposefully make meaning for ourselves out of the things that happen to us and the things that we do.
In lean prose, she moves from description to scrutiny with accuracy ... A story that compels us to revisit our own past, and to wonder if we share Ernaux’s unflinching clarity about recognizing the dial of life.
Reflective rather than descriptive ... The affair and the memoir it produced are entirely centered on the writer. This may strike some readers as cruel and selfish. Others may admire her independence, her skill with language, her defiance of gender stereotypes, and her candor.
