AT33, French author Edouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy (2017), and then in Change (2024), he wrote about the bullied gay son of a promising kid from a poor family who becomes a bestselling author. Several of his other books offer sympathetic sociological portraits of his parents: a father destroyed by manual labour, victims of cuts to French healthcare and housing subsidies, and a mother who, after raising several children in poverty, flees first from Louis’s father and then, in Monique Escapes, published earlier this year, as his abusive heir. Now, in Collapse, translated by novelist Tash Av, Lewis describes the death of his eldest brother at the age of 38 from alcohol-related complications.
“I felt nothing at the announcement of my brother’s death,” he begins; “Not sadness or despair or joy or happiness.” The reason for his coldness soon becomes clear. His brother was violently homophobic. At one point his drinking prevented Louis from sleeping before an important exam. After The End of Eddy was released, his brother went looking for him with a baseball bat. So when Lewis talks to his mother and sister about how to pay for his brother’s funeral and admits, “Yes, I would have buried him like a dog”, we understand why.
The Fall takes the form of a spiritual investigation of the brother’s fall. Lewis said The book took on different formats, a play, a diary, and a manifesto – experiments that can be glimpsed in the final product, which is a self-conscious blend of forms including witness testimony, a scripted dialogue between the author and his brother’s ghost, and key scenes presented as numbered facts.
Lewis’s long-term readers will be familiar with his tentative political diagnosis. Caught in the whirlpool of negative social forces, his brother had no chance. A friend told him, “Your brother was the first to suffer from alcoholism.” “It’s a story of class destiny that you’re telling before anything else,” suggests another. But these conclusions are too harsh for Louis. He writes, “My friends’ thoughts are clear, yet I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Moving towards new perspectives, he turns to literature: Catullus, Freud, Foucault, Joan Didion. Reading them helps Lewis find the distance necessary to think about his brother in new ways, and during the fall he slowly re-emerges as a tragically dignified man. Lewis describes his life as one of “destiny” and “injustice” and writes of his brother’s “wound”, a term that evokes not only the psychoanalytic work he cites but also the incurable wound of Amfortas pierced by the sacred spear in Wagner’s Parsifal. Although more mundane in origin, Lewis’s brother’s wound is equally inaccessible.
The wound is caused by the divorce of the boy’s parents – he and Louise have one mother but have different fathers – and is deepened by his father’s rejection and early death from alcoholism. Lewis’s mother remembers a drawing her brother made in childhood, “River of Blood, she never forgot bodies or coffins floating on the surface of an imaginary river”. The hurt never goes away. He distrusts the women he is with; He blames drinking for his humiliation. The wound is a tragic flaw, an invincible barrier. Lewis writes, “My brother’s life resembled the infinitely repeated image of a body struggling in the sand.” On her deathbed, his mother physically collapsed – an operatic gesture perfectly in keeping with the tragic scene emerging.
Read together with Monique Escapes, Lewis’s latest version reveals itself as the darker half of an equation that also has a more promising side. While her brother was unable to escape the cycle he was trapped in and it took his death to make sense of his life as a kind of redemption, Lewis’s mother Monique proves capable of forgiveness and growth. She sees in her son’s work how literature can not only be a form of retribution, convicting a person at his worst, but also a form of liberation. In fact, her escape, as written by her son, is made possible in part by her literary success – she escapes to his Paris apartment; It is the money from his writing that establishes him in his own home.
But the most important thing is that he remains aware of his destiny. At the end of Monique Escapes Lewis comments, “Through her, I have discovered the joy of writing in the service of someone else.” “I have become familiar with the joy that accompanies disappearance, self-destruction, becoming a mere glimpse in the story of some destiny other than one’s own… Nothing in literature has ever given me so much joy.” Although Louis has said that Collapse is close to writing their family saga, it’s hard to believe that we’ve seen the end of Monique.
