The new autofictional novel by the 33-year-old French writer Édouard Louis – Monique Escapes – begins with the urgency of a thriller. His mother calls him, distressed: her partner, a Paris caretaker, has become drunk and abusive; she is afraid. Over the ensuing hours, the pair plot her escape. When the man falls asleep, she packs her clothes and documents, careful not to wake him. Louis, in Athens on a writing residency, sends a taxi to collect her. On the app he watches the car icon moving through the Paris streets, carrying her to freedom: “As if by dint of concentration I could turn that symbol into a living, moving thing.”
Over seven books chronicling his life and the lives of his working-class family, Louis has revealed a dual sensibility as a writer. On the one hand, he is a gifted but traditional literary artist: psychologically acute and scrupulously attuned to veiled truths and moral complexity. On the other, he is a fervent social critic who aims to “provoke literature” by exposing the political and economic forces that constrain and deform lives on the margins.
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