Marie-Hélène Lafon was born in 1962 to a peasant family from the Cantal, an isolated highland region of Auvergne in Central France. Her father’s belief that the withering of peasant life following World War II was unstoppable – he saw himself as one of the ‘last Indians’ – led him, like many others, to send his children away. The path from the local boarding school (where she was spurred to shine by the peasant-baiting of bourgeois girls) to a scholarship at the Sorbonne, to an agrégation teaching diploma in classics and French, is emblematic of the social mobility of the trente glorieuses. Yet the peculiarities of Lafon’s background, a milieu that did not, she insists, read, let alone write books, had effects we may find extraordinary. Her first – apparently mind-blowing – encounter with literature was courtesy of Flaubert at school, and she claims not to have read a living author until her mid-thirties.
Within the year, simultaneously recognizing and surrendering to a pent-up desire, Lafon gave herself ‘permission’ to write, facing down prohibitions she’d unconsciously assimilated. The trio of living authors she happened upon helped orient her own themes and aesthetics. Richard Millet, Pierre Michon and Pierre Bergounioux share a rootedness in their places of origin but also a muscular, literary language that is anything but local or picturesque. Lafon’s Yoknapatawpha is the Cantal highlands that continue to inhabit her with the force of early experience and belonging, however unhappy the lonely bachelors and embittered or abused women who populate her fiction. An early story, ‘Alphonse’, follows the destruction of two misfit innocents by a brutal male farming culture, in flowing poetic prose strung between material detail and fervid impressionism. More recent work has explored the experience of those who, like the author, have left the old country, part fugitives, part exiles, and the ghostly ways in which origins may persist for good or ill.
The Son’s Story, awarded the Prix Renaudot in 2020, is the first of Lafon’s ten novels to appear in English. It follows two families, the Lachalmes and the Léotys, from 1908 to 2008, with each chapter visiting the world of a character in a now close, now glancing third person. There’s no dialogue, and nothing exceptional happens – except for the foundational tragedy at the end of the first, and perhaps most beautiful, of these immersions. It relays a supremely sensual infant consciousness while singing the fullness of prosperous farming life (the Lachalmes also own a hotel) in a Cantal village, the fictional Chanterelle, at the start of the last century. One of the five-year-old boy’s games is to match people with smells:
Georges smells of plum jam, when his aunt lets it simmer away in the copper basin in the summertime, he smells like that jam at precisely that moment, not when it is spread on bread for afternoon tea in the winter; even his father eats it and compliments his aunt who does not reply but looks at his father as if seeing him for the first time. Amélie smells of the river, swollen with snow melt in the springtime. Paul smells of the wind and of the cold blades of the kitchen knives they are forbidden to touch.
Yet little Armand is afraid of his father, and his fatal accident is connected to the fact that he loves Antoinette, the maid, more than he loves his mother. The question of genealogy – the importance or otherwise of filiation – turns out to be one of the book’s main themes. The titular son, André, won’t know who his father is until his (largely absent) mother reveals it on his wedding night, and never meets him. Yet his adoptive family is so warm and loving that the lack, the ‘chasm’, torments him only intermittently. It’s surely relevant that Lafon, happily divorced and childless by choice, has paid warm tribute to her own substitute families – her ‘nébuleuses familiales’.
The notion of linear transmission, of the control of family line that is as precious to peasant as to aristocratic societies, is also undermined by the novel’s structure. A chronology is impossible to keep hold of, because the chapters, each centred on a single day, pinball around the century. After 1908 comes 1919, focused on Armand’s twin brother Paul Lachalme, now sixteen and about to seduce Gabrielle Léoty, the school nurse; these two will be André’s progenitors. But next come 1950, 1934, 1923, 1935, 1960, 1962, 1945, 1984, 1974, and finally 2008, in which little Armand’s great-nephew, a corporate executive in Los Angeles, visits the ancestral ‘enchanted kingdom’ of Chanterelle and its graves exactly 100 years after Armand’s death, and ‘feels the shifting of tectonic plates’.
The disorder of narrative time suggests that every now is both sufficient unto itself and also connected to inapprehensible causes and effects. It at once involves and estranges the reader: privy to various futures, we acquire a poignant omniscience about certain aspects of the narrative, while others remain obscure. We know who André’s father is, and why he wasn’t told about his son. We have been with André’s mother in Paris, after she foisted the baby on her sister and brother-in-law, and so when the family speculate about her life between twice-yearly visits, we know that the ‘light-hearted, hedonistic’ Gabrielle is really a mask. Instead of wondering what will happen, we wonder if or when who will find what out.
Chronology matters less, though, when character is so consistent. Each nature persists, seemingly impervious to ageing or the twentieth century. Some natures oddly come as a job lot: André, his adoptive aunt and uncle and cousins, and then his wife, are immutably pure and good, indeed famously so. ‘People particularly relished the contagious joy which had always been present in that house, such a happy malady in the face of so many unpleasant ones, and this fatherless André had found luck in his misfortune.’ Naturally, André becomes a hero of the maquis. There’s more salt to his parents, Gabrielle and Paul, whose affair formed the secret hinge between the families. Gabrielle too is a peasant émigrée, but when she follows her young lover, from the provincial capital where they met, to Paris, and fails to keep him, she finds the big city suits her. Cold and contained, she deplores Paul’s dwelling on the family-shattering effects of his twin’s death, considering it ‘false, affected and attention-seeking, she did not like the word martyred either, which he uttered with a sort of anguished voluptuousness’. She stoically plays the game that she has chosen.
Paul himself, while not the violent male who regularly haunts Lafon’s fiction, is a version of what she ironically pronounces as ‘le mâââle’, understanding as she does the cultural vectors of maleness. Ambitious, charismatic, a hunter of women as well as animals and a flashy lawyer-about-town, Paul’s avowal of his childhood trauma is the one soft part of him. His status as the eldest son gives him a blind self-belief: ‘This gift he had always had of feeling at home, of feeling legitimate and desirable, wherever he was, it came from here, from Chanterelle, from that name, from his mother, from the house, the land, the raw air.’ Yet Paul soon disappears as a protagonist, relegated to hearsay: it seems some dodgy wartime dealings led to at least temporary disgrace. André finally works up the courage to stake out his Paris office in 1962, but no one comes out.
Lafon honours these modest lives, or ‘vies minuscules’ to quote the title of Pierre Michon’s 1984 masterpiece, in a hybrid language, highly literary and yet infused with oral rhythms and idioms. She loves rare or obsolete words in French – roboratif, accointrance, immarcescible, extrace – and her immersion in the classics governs sentences at once expansive and tightly engineered, often using quasi-Latinate constructions, with copious use of the subjunctive, cascading relative clauses, and rhetorical moves such as parataxis, while remaining closely linked to the physical and carnal. This is not how her characters would talk, for all their sensitivity to language, several being prone to ‘chewing’ or ‘savouring’ words along with experiencing the world synaesthetically. Yet a high-end style conveys their universal humanity more respectfully than any mimesis of common speech. (I would also venture, after hearing Lafon in interviews, that something more personal is going on: her spontaneous orality is as formally polished as her prose, to the extent of using the exclusively literary passé simple.)
Such a manner is very hard to reproduce in English. Though the book’s translator, Stephanie Smee, finds many elegant solutions, she can also be needlessly wordy, dissipating the controlled momentum of the original, and there are some surprising mistranslations. But Smee, a champion of Lafon’s work, must be thanked by English readers for opening this lyrical window onto the ways in which the French peasantry adapts and endures, its diaspora down the generations obscurely branded by a way of life, based on the mystique of place, that never quite dies the death predicted by sociologists as much as by the author’s father. The final chapter, set in 2008, reveals that Paul’s nephew, also named Armand, has inherited Chanterelle and settled there. The Léotys and Lachalmes will holiday together in the enchanted kingdom where ‘another family history could start’. That question – what is family? – is conventionally answered in the end.
Read on: Jacob Collins, ‘Ego-History Lessons’, NLR 145.