it explained his own life to him, perhaps better than his own perceptions of
his own life. After the talk, he approached Eribon, who invited him to have
a drink with a group of professors, and eventually Louis, a fi rst-year student,
joined Eribon’s graduate seminars. Eribon had also been close friends with
Pierre Bourdieu. Louis, at 18, embarked on a course of reading, starting with
Foucault and Bourdieu. ‘‘As soon as I quoted a book, he had read it by the
following week,’’ Eribon once told Le Monde.
A year later, Eribon encouraged Louis to apply for the graduate program
at the École Normale Supérieure. Louis was accepted and moved to Paris,
leaving behind Amiens for the metropolis, where he could live freely as
a gay man. It was also there, confronted with liberal circles that seemed
utterly oblivious to the lives of families like his, that Louis began to write.
When, eventually, he submitted the manuscript of ‘‘The End of Eddy’’ to
a publisher, the publisher worried that the French public simply wouldn’t
believe that the kind of poverty Louis described still existed in France.
Louis sees literature to a large extent as a political project, one that he
believes may accomplish more than politics itself; the language of politics,
he argues, is meant to conceal rather than reveal the truth. He often says
that he hopes to confront readers ‘‘with what they don’t want to see.’’ But he
also stresses the humility inherent in the act of writing. ‘‘I always write with
a sense of shame,’’ Louis told me. After the shoot wrapped in Amiens, I met
him back in Paris at what might be the only working-class cafe in the city’s
14th arrondissement, an unadorned space that sells espressos and lottery
tickets on the cheap. Louis typically works until 2 or 3 in the morning and
sleeps until noon, and he suggested we meet at around 4 p.m., though he
showed up a few minutes late, perhaps intentionally. (A friend of his later
told me that Louis fi nds being on time a ‘‘bit conformist.’’) He knew the
cafe’s Vietnamese owners well and sat down without ordering anything. ‘‘I
have this feeling that I am here in front of my computer every day, for fi ve
hours, six hours, seven hours, when I could be in the street,’’ he said. ‘‘When
I write, I compare my life to my mother’s, for example, and I think: What
are you writing when she actually had to live it? From age 25 to 45 she was
with a macho tyrant’’ — Louis’s father — ‘‘who took away her freedom, and
you, what are you going to do, just write?’’
Louis speaks of the decision to leave Hallencourt as the ‘‘tragedy of
escape’’: ‘‘It was a failure to conform to the norms of masculinity,’’ he said.
But certainly, he had ambitions. The Malaysian writer Tash Aw, who has
become close friends with Louis and is 20 years older, regularly spent
months at a time in Hallencourt with his French partner, who is from
the region. One day, ‘‘when there was still a bakery in town,’’ Aw told
me, his partner came home and said to him: ‘‘There’s a 15-year-old, you
know the guy we see walking around the street, who is working there
on Saturdays. He says he wants to become a writer. Maybe you can go
and talk to him.’’ Aw said , laughing, that he replied: ‘‘You know what? I’m
fi nishing my novel. I really just cannot deal with this — it’s Hallencourt,
it’s never going to have a writer.’’ Years later, after Louis published his fi rst
novel, Aw ran into him at a literary festival in Lillehammer, Norway. He
introduced himself and told Louis that he already knew who he was, and
that he knew his entire family too.
There seems a certain ambivalence to Louis’s life now, an apprecia-
tion of and pleasure in accomplishment coupled with a measure of guilt
about what it has brought him. He constantly turns the conversation
to the needs of others, as if to reassure himself of his own intentions.
Louis’s relationship with his family has become a kind of casualty of his
immense success, subject to a public scrutiny that is no less diffi cult for
being expected. After ‘‘The End of Eddy’’ was published, French journalists
descended on Hallencourt to fact-check Louis’s portrait of the town. The
Courrier Picard, a regional newspaper based in Amiens, fi lmed a short
clip, which was picked up by a national broadcaster, with Louis’s mother
and younger siblings appearing shellshocked and protesting that they
didn’t recognize themselves in the book’s portrayals. Louis accused the
journalists of exhibiting ‘‘racism of class.’’ He refl ected later, however,
that while the book had angered his mother, it had actually repaired his
relationship with his father. ‘‘People surprise you sometimes,’’ he said. (I
did not talk to the family, as they and Louis have understandably become
reluctant to speak of the matter publicly and a certain amount of strain
still exists among some family members. He worried aloud that I would
publish the location of his apartment in Paris, and that one of his brothers
would fi nd out where he lived.)
When I attended a talk that Louis gave with Aw in Berlin last September,
Aw tried to ask him about his relationship with his father. ‘‘I have seen you
with your father, a little-known secret, but I have,’’ Aw said. ‘‘And I was trying
to fi gure out when I saw you what your relationship was.’’ Louis defl ected.
‘‘You ask very diffi cult questions,’’ he said. ‘‘I thought we were going to talk
about literature, which is much easier.’’ Everyone laughed. Louis retreated
into a consideration of how his father’s willingness to conform to masculine
norms has made the relationships in his life more diffi cult. Aw eventually
gave up and moved on. At another point in the talk, Louis likened publishing
his book to an experience described in one of Aw’s own novels, in which
a journalist tells the story of a poor migrant who has committed a murder.
The journalist writes a book about the migrant’s story and throws a chic
literary party to celebrate its publication. The migrant comes to the party,
but he doesn’t really understand what’s going on around him. ‘‘SometimesFrom top: Raymond Delalande/Sipa, via AP; Teddy Wolff.52 4.5.20
Stage adaptations of Louis’s novels
‘‘Who Killed My Father,’’ top, and ‘‘History of Violence.’’