The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

The End of Eddy (En Finir Avec Eddy Bellegueulle)
By Édouard Louis
Editions du Seuil, 2014 (2017)
Four stars

“At this age, to succeed would have meant to be like everyone else. I tried everything.”

“The End of Eddy” is an eloquently grim little memoir that effectively eliminates every romantic notion one ever might have had about France or the French. I read it in the original French, both as an exercise to reawaken my skills, but also to get the flavor of the original novel, penned by a young Frenchman (26 in 2018, 22 when it was first published in Paris) who survived a childhood more wretched than that of the most pathetic Dickens character.

There are plenty of young adult stories about gay teens struggling against the odds in contemporary America – the horrors of homophobia in high school, unsupportive families; but nothing quite comes to the level of nastiness of rural, ill-educated, blue-collar Picardy in the early 2000s that Louis offers us. Indeed, the worst stereotype of Appalachian America can hardly match it. Grindingly poor in its reality, toxically masculine in its culture, proudly ignorant and racist in its social attitudes, Eddy Bellegueulle’s world is a recipe for self-destructive behavior. How this delicate, intelligent boy survives his father’s determination to make him “un dur” (a tough guy) is something of a miracle. And yet he does not survive unbroken, and the painfully frustrating finale of the story is somehow perfect in its razor-sharp irony.

Isolated by their language as much as their poverty, these are French people entirely apart from anything we worldly Americans imagine the French to be. We might sneer at them, but it is the French themselves who made them what they are; the conditions among the working poor in France have produced this underclass in which the unfortunate Eddy must make his way. The most chilling aspect of this tale of woe is that Eddy’s people could stand in for downtrodden, exploited, ill-equipped working-class people anywhere in the world. In England, this is one aspect of the voice of Brexit; in America, one side of the supporters of President Trump.

This is not a story of triumph, not even close. It will be supremely unsatisfying for many American readers, and yet there is something so very true in this miserly story of grit and self-salvation that one can’t help but feel that Eddy will beat the odds – somehow. I don’t what the author’s ironic purpose was in choosing Eddy’s name - Bellegueulle translates roughly into “prettyface” – but it remains to the very end a kind of stark reminder of the inner strength of this tough little boy who will have to beat all odds to find some kind of meager happy ending.