When White Working-Class Fury Came of Age

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/books/review/nicolas-mathieu-their-children-after-them.html

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AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEMBy Nicolas Mathieu

Midway through Nicolas Mathieu’s deceptively simple second novel, “And Their Children After Them,” the community of Heillange — a fictional French valley town on the border with Luxembourg that has been ravaged by deindustrialization — masses together for the funeral of a former factory worker of no particular distinction, a genial friend of the protagonist’s father. The church is an “impressive Roman-looking” structure that, like so many markers of France’s past glories, now stands to underscore its present decline. “Each time a family buried a drunkard or a silicosis victim,” Mathieu writes, “it felt as if they had somehow earned the right to a national funeral.”

The protagonist, Anthony — whose modest life we trace from the summer of 1992, when he is 14, to the summer of 1998, that almost mythical season of euphoric fraternité during the World Cup — sits in the pews, gazing at the Catholic splendors without understanding or feeling connected to any of them, a stranger in his own land. These religious symbols evoke a discipline and a tradition that is too remote and far too abstract for a boy who barely understands or feels connected to his own underemployed, alcoholic father — or himself, for that matter.

With a deft touch, Mathieu rattles off the deceased’s work history, which tracks the economic fortunes of the valley, and notes the man’s political evolution, from union activist to proselytizer for the National Front (now the National Rally). This laid-off factory worker “gradually began to think that the poor suckers whose cause he served weren’t just workers, wage earners, provincials and dropouts,” Mathieu writes. “They were also native-born Frenchmen. The real problem was the influx of immigrants.”

Yet the funeral is by no means an all-white affair. The North Africans who settled in France in the 1960s and stayed to rear families, who worked side by side with the deceased man and his friends until the factory shuttered, have come to pay their respects, too. In their presence, the white Frenchmen must bottle up any xenophobic ideas: “A kind of vague shame, like politeness, kept them in check.” It is those North Africans’ French-born, sometimes furious children in whom we now detect the possibility of violence.

“And Their Children After Them” is fundamentally a coming-of-age story. Chance encounters set in motion a series of events that will come to define the life trajectories of a small cohort of Gen Xers and their families. Mathieu follows the directionless, unexceptional, endearing Anthony most closely. But he alternates too between the perspectives of Anthony’s abusive, somewhat softhearted father and his devoted mother, whose life has been distinguished — and one might say disfigured — by her youthful sexual allure. We also glimpse the world of Anthony’s love interests and rivals, a couple of whom are upwardly mobile. Most notable among them is his antagonist, Hacine, an enraged, drug-dealing son of one of those hardworking North African guest workers.

Throughout this page-turner of a novel, there are elements of Michel Houellebecq’s suffocating atmospheres of Occidental decadence, rife with soul-crushingly pointless labor and leisure pursuits and the impossibility of meaningful interpersonal bonds. There is also a whiff of Camus’s “The Stranger,” as the centuries-long confrontation between the white Frenchman and the Arab, the colonizer and the colonized, the native and the interloper — whose positions, the factory workers might argue, have now been reversed — moves from colony to motherland.

But the French author I had in mind most often as I sat with Mathieu’s naturalistic portraits of marginalized lives in a forgettable part of eastern France was Christophe Guilluy. Not a novelist but a geographer, Guilluy coined the term that “And Their Children After Them” so meticulously works to illustrate: la France périphérique. It is a punishing, desolate space determined not by physical distance from the capital but by isolation from all the healthy parts and spoils of the globalized economy. Heillange is the epitome of this new periphery, which, as it turns out, is where the majority of the nation happens to live.

Mathieu’s novel won France’s top literary award, the Goncourt Prize, in late 2018, just as the Yellow Vest protests began metastasizing across the country, seemingly out of nowhere and ostensibly over a trivial fuel tax increase. France’s business, political and cultural winners scrambled to understand what was going on. The traditional narrative of the left-right divide could not capture the leaderless movement’s hodgepodge assortment of prejudices, grievances and demands (a chaos in which a nativist party like the National Rally naturally thrives). The question suddenly arose: Just who are these proud and wounded men and women who’d come to feel so unseen that the reasonable solution seemed to be to throw on reflective vests and stand in the middle of the road?

As suffused with local color as this book is, parallels with left-behind swaths of America (and England, and many other places, too) stand out on every page. This description of the experience outside of the world’s thriving, continuously gentrifying urban centers goes a long way toward explaining the astonishing rage directed at a 25-cent diesel tax, but Mathieu could also be talking about the New Jersey suburb I was raised in:

“Life here was a matter of trips. You went to school, to see your friends, to town, to the beach, to smoke a joint behind the pool, to meet somebody in the little park. It was all comings and goings. Same for the adults: to work, to run errands, to the babysitters, to Midas for a tuneup, to the movies. Each desire implied a distance; each pleasure required fuel. People wound up thinking of the place as a road map.”

It is easy to see why this novel, which arrives just on time and contains the secret history of the current political upheaval, would find such critical acclaim. But it is a flawed artwork all the same — a somewhat ineptly translated narrative (“you guys give me a pain,” one native-born character declares) that incongruously balances raw pornographic sex scenes with the pacing, vocabulary and plot structure of saccharine Y.A. fiction. Its descriptive language can be comically bad, with phrases any creative writing instructor would banish from her class: A heart is “as heavy as an anvil”; the day is “as hot as a frying pan”; expressions flit across faces “like clouds”; a mixed-race girl is “a knockout”; a MAC 50 pistol is “super beautiful.”

Mathieu’s melodramatic tale is mimetic almost to a fault of the smallness of the social conditions it seeks to convey. And yet, I couldn’t put the book down. I didn’t want it to end. What, exactly, is fiction for? I found myself wrestling with this question throughout. Certainly there is the Wildean argument of art for art’s sake, in light of which this work can be wanting, an example of the contemporary emphasis on content at the expense of craft. But there is also that other, mysterious appeal in which a story resonates in ways that even the most devastating sociology and journalism cannot. And that is what will keep me thinking of these unremarkable characters in this made-up town for a very long time.