Édouard Louis’s New Book ‘Collapse’ – Coming to Terms with a Brother’s Death

At 33, French writer Édouard Louis, all seven of whose slim novels have been translated into English, has published a new book, ‘Collapse’. In it, he describes the death of his eldest brother at age 38 from complications related to alcoholism. The book opens with the line: “I felt nothing at the announcement of the death of my brother,” and it soon becomes clear why: the brother was violently homophobic, once prevented Louis from sleeping before a crucial exam, and after Louis’s debut ‘The End of Eddy’ came out, went looking for him with a baseball bat. When Louis talks with his mother and sister about paying for the funeral, he admits, “yes, I would have let him be buried like a dog.”

‘Collapse’ takes the form of a metaphysical inquest into the brother’s decline. Louis has said the book was in various drafts a play, a diary and a manifesto – experiments that can be glimpsed in the final product, a self-conscious hodgepodge of forms including witness testimony, a scripted dialogue with the brother’s ghost, and key scenes presented as numbered facts. Long-term readers of Louis will be familiar with his tentative political diagnosis: the brother, caught in a vortex of negative social forces, stood no chance. “Your brother was above all else a victim of alcoholism,” a friend tells him. “It’s the narrative of a class destiny that you’re telling before anything else,” suggests another. But Louis finds these conclusions too pat: “My friends have clear ideas yet I don’t know, I don’t know,” he writes.

Reaching for fresh perspectives, he turns to literature: Catullus, Freud, Foucault, Joan Didion. His reading helps Louis find the distance to think of his brother in new ways, and over the course of the book his brother gradually re-emerges as a kind of tragically ennobled figure. Louis describes his life in terms of “Destiny” and “Injustice” and writes of his brother’s “Wound”, a word that evokes not just the psychoanalytic work he cites but the incurable injury of Amfortas in Wagner’s Parsifal. The Wound is triggered by the divorce of the boy’s parents – he and Louis share a mother but have different fathers – and intensified by his father’s rejection and early death, also from alcoholism. Louis’s mother remembers a drawing his brother made as a child of “a river of blood, she never forgot the bodies or coffins that floated on the surface of an imaginary river”. The hurt never leaves; he distrusts women, blames his drinking on his humiliations. “My brother’s life resembled the infinitely repeating image of a body struggling in quicksand,” Louis writes. At his death, their mother physically collapses – an operatic gesture congruent with the emerging tragic scene.

Read in tandem with ‘Monique Escapes’, Louis’s latest reveals itself as the dark half of an equation that also has a more hopeful side. While his brother was unable to escape the cycle, Louis’s mother Monique has proved capable of forgiveness and growth. She sees in her son’s work how literature can be not just a form of revenge but also liberating. Her escapes, as chronicled by her son, are enabled in part by his literary success – she flees to his Parisian apartment, and the money from his writing sets her up in her own house. “Through her, I’ve discovered the pleasure of writing in the service of someone else,” Louis remarks at the end of ‘Monique Escapes’. “I’ve become acquainted with the delight that accompanies disappearance, self-effacement, becoming just a glimpse into the story of a destiny other than my own … Nothing in literature has ever given me so much joy.” Though Louis has said that ‘Collapse’ marks a close to writing his family saga, it’s hard to believe we’ve seen the end of Monique.