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At 33, the French writer Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy (2017), and again in Change (2024), he wrote about being the promising child of a poor family, the bullied gay son who became a bestselling author. Several of his other books have offered sympathetic sociological portraits of his parents: a father destroyed by physical labour, a victim of French healthcare and housing subsidy cutbacks, and a mother who, after raising numerous children in poverty, fled first Louis’s father and then, in Monique Escapes, published earlier this year, his abusive successor. Now, in Collapse, translated by novelist Tash Aw, Louis describes his eldest brother’s death, at 38, from complications relating to alcoholism.
“I felt nothing at the announcement of the death of my brother,” he begins; “not sadness or despair or joy or pleasure.” The reasons for his coldness soon become clear. His brother was violently homophobic. His drinking at one point prevented Louis from sleeping ahead of a crucial exam. After The End of Eddy came out, his brother went looking for him with a baseball bat. So when Louis talks with his mother and sister about how to pay for his brother’s funeral and admits, “yes, I would have let him be buried like a dog”, we understand why.
Collapse takes the form of a metaphysical inquest into the brother’s decline. Louis has said that the book was in various drafts a play, a diary and a manifesto – experiments that can all be glimpsed in the final product, which is a self-conscious hodgepodge of forms including witness testimony, a scripted dialogue between the author and his brother’s ghost and key scenes presented as numbered facts.
Long-term readers of Louis will be familiar with his tentative political diagnosis. His brother, ensnared in a vortex of negative social forces, stood no chance. “Your brother was above all else a victim of alcoholism,” a friend tells him. “It’s the narrative of a class destiny that you’re telling before anything else,” suggests another. But these conclusions are too pat for Louis. “My friends have clear ideas yet I don’t know, I don’t know,” he writes.
Reaching for fresh perspectives, he turns to literature: Catullus, Freud, Foucault, Joan Didion. His reading helps Louis find the distance he needs to think of his brother in new ways, and over the course of Collapse he gradually re-emerges as a kind of tragically ennobled figure. Louis describes his life in terms of “Destiny” and “Injustice” and writes of his brother’s “Wound”, a word that evokes not just the psychoanalytic work he cites but the incurable injury of Amfortas, pierced by the Holy Spear, in Wagner’s Parsifal. Though more mundane in provenance, Louis’s brother’s Wound is equally insurmountable.
The Wound is triggered by the divorce of the boy’s parents – he and Louis share a mother but have different fathers – and intensified by his father’s rejection and early death, also from alcoholism. Louis’s mother remembers a drawing his brother made as a child of “a river of blood, she never forgot the bodies or coffins that floated on the surface of an imaginary river”. The hurt never leaves. He distrusts the women he’s with; he blames his drinking on his humiliations. The Wound is a tragic flaw, an unconquerable inhibitor. “My brother’s life resembled the infinitely repeating image of a body struggling in quicksand,” Louis writes. At his death, his mother physically collapses – an operatic gesture entirely congruent with the emerging tragic scene.
Read in tandem with Monique Escapes, Louis’s latest reveals itself as the dark half of an equation that also has a more hopeful side. While his brother was unable to escape the cycle in which he was ensnared and it took his death to make a kind of redemptive sense of his life, Louis’s mother Monique has proved capable of forgiveness and growth. She sees in her son’s work how literature can be not just a form of revenge, indicting a person at their worst, but also liberating. Indeed, her escapes, as chronicled by her son, are enabled in part by his literary success – it’s to his Parisian apartment she flees; it’s the money from his writing that sets her up in her own house.
But most importantly, she retains a sense of her own destiny. “Through her, I’ve discovered the pleasure of writing in the service of someone else,” Louis remarks at the end of Monique Escapes. “I’ve become acquainted with the delight that accompanies disappearance, self-effacement, becoming just a glimpse into the story of a destiny other than my own … Nothing in literature has ever given me so much joy.” Though Louis has said that Collapse marks a close to writing his family saga, it’s hard to believe we’ve seen the end of Monique.
