Its thinness begins to tell the sentences just don’t work hard enough. In the remainder of the novel, though – where a surprise encounter in a Bordeaux hotel lobby opens up the past for the now-famous Philippe, and he finds out what’s become of his old lover – the writing lacks the nostalgic specificity of the adolescent section. Alien details of clothes and teenage social life and pop culture are interesting for an English reader.
Eventually the strains of shame and secrecy are unbearable, and he leaves to live in Spain with his mother’s family.īesson’s spare style, with its short declarative sentences, works best in this part of the book, where the rather thin texture is freighted with the specifics of a provincial French town in the 1980s, and with analysis of the complex tensions around class, which confer power briefly on the good-looking peasant boy. The sex is raw and transforming, but they don’t talk much – in public Thomas won’t admit to knowing Philippe. “Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realise it … Because you will leave and we will stay.” There follow sexual encounters in the secret places Thomas knows: the locker room at the basketball court, a shed next to the football field, eventually in Philippe’s teenage bedroom. One amazing day in the playground, however, it turns out that Thomas has noticed Philippe after all, and has been cherishing a secret passion for him, precisely because he’s different. Out of instinct, I despised packs”), he knows better than to avow it openly to his schoolfriends. Philippe is clear already that he’s gay, and although he doesn’t mind being different (“I wouldn’t follow packs. He assumes that Thomas is straight, and oblivious to him – that he “doesn’t know me at all”. Across the class divide Philippe yearns for Thomas’s beautiful and unattainable self-possession, though he never dares look at him directly. Philippe’s father is the headmaster of a primary school Thomas’s has a small dairy farm and sells the produce of his vineyard to local cognac distilleries, while his mother comes from a family of Spanish migrant labourers. Philippe and Thomas are 17 years old and at school together they’ve never spoken because Philippe is in those classes that prepare the children of bourgeois families to progress in their education, and Thomas isn’t. It’s told economically in fewer than 150 pages.
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