Leurs enfants après eux by Nicolas Mathieu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Leurs enfants après eux by Nicolas Mathieu Edward Ousselin Mathieu, Nicolas. Leurs enfants après eux. Actes Sud, 2018. ISBN 978-2-330-10871-7. Pp. 432. As it happens, I was reading this novel when the Gilets jaunes movement began. I was struck by the fact that the author seemed to be describing the stark socioeconomic divide between prosperous service-sector-oriented urban centers and blighted smaller industrial towns and rural areas. This is roughly the divide that has been described by Stéphane Guilluy in La France périphérique (Flammarion, 2014), and which seems to be the driving force behind the protest movement that started in late 2018. In many ways, this narrative could be set in the American Rust Belt, but it is instead set in Eastern France during the 1990s. In the fictional town of Heillange, the steel industry has died out. Les hauts-fourneaux, shuttered and slowly rusting, still dominate the landscape, silent witnesses to an industrial past. Unemployment is high and young people have few hopes of obtaining good jobs after leaving school. The collapse of the industrial sector has been accompanied by a decline in social services, particularly in terms of public transportation, which makes cars and motorcycles all the more necessary. As for trains, they now rarely stop at the town's decaying station. Faced with few opportunities for employment, many people get by as best they can, taking low-paid part-time jobs and working off the books (le travail au noir). Of course, there is brisk business in the drug trade. And yet, pathos is largely absent from Leurs enfants après eux. The matter-of-fact tone simply reflects the reality of stagnating or declining living standards for most local inhabitants. The novel's main characters are a loosely-linked group of teenagers who are glimpsed at two-year intervals, from 1992 to 1998. From one episode to the next, they grow older, sometimes fight or have sex, often drink too much. They eventually settle down and accept their lot in life. A few lucky ones, due to their exceptionally high grades in school, go to Paris in order to move up the social ladder. There are no climactic or redemptive moments, no epiphanies. Characters do evolve, but usually in the direction of more self-destructiveness. A motorcycle, prized and fought over by the young men, serves as a plot device at the beginning and the conclusion of the narrative. Nicolas Mathieu's gritty, realistic social novel won the 2018 Prix Goncourt. The previous year, Éric Vuillard's L'ordre du jour (Actes Sud), which was mainly a historical account of events leading to World War II, broke precedent by hardly qualifying as a novel. At a stylistic level, the salient characteristic of Mathieu's writing is the way he interweaves current slang along with "standard" French. While it is not uplifting, this novel provides a glimpse of the zones rurales et périurbaines that do not fit into the traditional vision of French society. [End Page 240] Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French