Released by childhood from a life in detention

On the surface this is a simple story, but, constantly witty in tone, it builds to a luscious conclusion
Talitha Stevenson1 August 2013

A French Novel
by Frédéric Beigbeder, translated by Frank Wynne
(4th Estate, £14.99)

“I had just found out my brother had been made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur when I was arrested,” explains Frédéric, at the start of A French Novel. A few hours before, he was caught snorting cocaine off the bonnet of a car in front of a nightclub in Paris. Frédéric understands his predicament in petulant terms: “God had faith in my brother and he had abandoned me.” Eventually, when his rage and anxiety become unbearable, he distracts himself by trying to recall the childhood he believes he has forgotten. He soon discovers that “when you are in prison, childhood floats back to you. Perhaps what I took for amnesia was merely freedom”.

Though A French Novel might be seen as a memoir — the details of Frédéric’s life all belong to the life of the author — it was awarded the distinguished Prix Renaudot, given for a work of fiction. On the surface it is a simple story with a creaky framing device: immature and narcissistic boy-man of 42 has “amnesia” about his childhood. When compelled to remember and acknowledge his past, he comes to life emotionally and is then released from prison in a literal and a metaphorical sense.

The central device — Frédéric’s “amnesia” — is never convincing; Frédéric too often remembers things which he claims have always triggered his childhood memories — playing games with his daughter Chloe, for example is “My DeLorean (the car from Back to the Future)”. And his intellectually lurid preoccupation with memory and forgetting gives rise to a lot of tired and mixed-up metaphors: “I dreamed of being a free electron but it is impossible to forever cut all ties with one’s roots.”

But once the device recedes — it does so within the first few chapters — Frédéric doesn’t just remember his childhood, he relives it in sensuous detail: “We played conkers … to a soundtrack of the dull thwock of tennis balls and the whisper of canvas Spring Court shoes on the ochre clay of the courts.” And this personal history is also a bright fragment of the story of France: “The world into which I was born has little in common with the world we know today. It was the France that existed before May 1968, still presided over by a General who wore a grey uniform.”

It is Frédéric’s description of his parents and his experience of their divorce that gives warmest life to the shifts he saw in French society. “My father experienced the capitalist dream and my mother the feminist utopia.” Their dreams for themselves and the ideals of their day come to seem inextricable. 1972 is identified as the year in which the “war between the generations ended”, when it became “possible to be bourgeois and a hedonist, Catholicism no longer prohibited pleasure”. It was in 1972 that “we witnessed our parents being born”.

Though the book grows rich with Frédéric’s nostalgia and regret, it is consistently witty in tone — and fizzing with references to TV and films, from NYPD Blue to Eric Rohmer. Beigbeder has a unique sensibility: a scene in which the hungover Frédéric imagines arguing with a childhood portrait of himself, for example, is an electric portrayal of frailty and defiance. And as Frédéric assimilates his past, he assumes responsibility for his adult life. Even recent memories acquire new force. Following his own divorce, he took his daughter to a psychiatrist: “In a room strewn with brightly coloured toys, my daughter drew a house with a large mother inside and a tiny father outside.” After its cerebral beginning, A French Novel builds to an emotionally luscious conclusion.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £12.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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