On March 20, 2020, S&P Global reported that Hayange, the France-based manufacturer of train rails now owned by British Steel, may be sold separately from the rest of the company. Two days earlier, the Chinese Jingye Group agreed to proceed toward its acquisition of British Steel, which is near bankruptcy. In the midst of the negotiations, the French government declared that the Hayange plant is “a strategic national asset” since it produces rails for France’s state-owned railway operator. But the raw steel for the rails is shipped to Hayange from British Steel’s factory in Scunthorpe, England – because the ArcelorMittal Florange-Hayange blast furnaces, in France’s northeastern Moselle department, are shuttered and rusting.
The elimination of jobs at Hayange accelerated in the 1990s, the decade imagined in Nicolas Mathieu’s novel And Their Children After Them. Mathieu grew up in the Lorraine region, the son of an electrical mechanic. For some time he was employed by the labor ministry, attending works council meetings at scores of companies. (A works council in a French company – comité d’enterprise – is made up of elected employees, union reps and a company manager.) He took notes for his reports, observing as officials delivered bad news to powerless workers. His novel gathers its authority from having witnessed the crushing of working adults — but his subject is their children and their reaction to diminished possibilities and emotional ruination in their families.
Beginning in 1992, the narrative follows several teenage characters through four summers, ending in 1998. Most prominent is Anthony, 14-years old at the outset, whose most notable characteristic is a drooping eyelid. There is Hacine Bouali, the son of a Moroccan immigrant, restless and indignant. Stéphanie, the daughter of an affluent businessman, cruises around town with her pal Vanessa. Mathieu doesn’t have a feel for nuance and wisely abstains from getting too far into the heads of his characters. We tag along as they get into trouble and tolerate or deceive their parents. Anthony’s side of a conversation is usually content-free. It is the narrator who takes pains to fill in what the teenagers aren’t fully articulating. In the scene quoted below, Anthony follows his cousin through town after an adult named Manu has given them a gun, perhaps to recoup a motorbike that Hacine has stolen from Anthony:
“He was suddenly overcome by the old malaise, of being sick of it all. It would never end, this feeling of being under people’s thumbs, being young, and having to account for himself. At times he felt so bad he started getting desperate ideas. In movies, people had symmetrical faces, clothes that fit, and means of locomotion, usually. Whereas he lived by default, flunking school, getting around on foot, hopeless with girls, and he couldn’t even keep it together.”
How Mathieu keeps his novel together is itself a marvel. When And Their Children After Them was awarded the Prix Goncourt, the citation noted the novel’s urgent topical relevance and attention to “the forgotten.” But after all, this is a novel of minor events and interactions, constructed like a 12-episode HBO drama – and one is quickly engaged by the trenchant phrasing and blunt tone, the surface of scenes, the gestures of characters that become familiar over time. Finally one realizes that the unnamed speaker is the seminal mind here, and that this is a text about observation and attitude. Mathieu pivots nimbly between the narrator’s tart assessments and terse telling of plot. Time and again, the narrator turns from the action, such as it is, to remark on the city environs:
“For a century, the Heillange blast furnaces had sucked all the life out of the region, gulping down people, time, and raw materials all at once. On one side, carts on tracks trundled in fuel and mineral ores. On the other, metal ingots left by train before taking rivers and streams to slowly make their way across Europe.
Located at the crossroads, the mill’s insatiable body had lasted as long as it could, fed by roads and exhaustion, nourished by a whole network of channels, which, once everything was deposited and sold by weight, had cruelly bled parts of the town dry. Those ghostly absences stirred memories, as did the overgrown train tracks, fading billboards, and bullet-riddled street signs
Anthony knew this history well. He’d been told it his whole childhood …”
Noting his influences, Mathieu has remarked that Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Annie Ernaux, and Jean-Patrick Manchette have guided him toward percussive expression. Perhaps the mode of noir novels by Manchette is most telling here – in the way social issues lurk in shadows of noir stories, and how environment is often a character of its own. Mathieu’s teenage bodies pursue each other for thrills, spasms and highs; there is much smoking of hashish, transported by car up from North Africa, transferred to sellers in mall parking lots. Everything seems to exist on the brink of fatality. The acerbic attitude of And Their Children After Them is its secret sauce – and as one follows the narrow path of the plot, its bitterly flairing perspective lights the way.
For instance — Stéphanie, who lives in an upscale neighborhood, notices that her friend’s father gazes at her body. The narrator says:
“It was too weird, having men circling you with their heavy bodies and hulking shoulders, their cigarette breath, their strength, their hairiness, and their heavy, sexy, sickening hands. Stéphanie found it confusing; she was wary of them, but drawn to them. She also thought of what the men could do, with their big German cars and their credit cards. These were guys who supported a family, paid exorbitant business school tuition for their clueless offspring, had a boat nearby, gave their opinions, and thought that being mayor of their village wouldn’t be a bad idea, with their mistresses, their debts, their enlarged hearts ready to burst, their little whiskeys with friends, and the XXL Ralph Lauren shirts. Yet all that power would shrink to nothing because of some girl.”
This candid tone is also employed to describe the lives of stateless immigrants like Hacine’s father who “hung suspended between two languages and two shores, were badly paid, disrespected, uprooted, and had no heritage to pass on. From this their children, and especially their sons, developed an abiding feeling of disappointment.” France’s class tiers are spelled out. The translation has its clunky moments, and though William Modamor does his best to retain Mathieu’s clipped street-wise voice, the idiomatic phrases often sound inappropriate or too American.
But And Their Children After Them fascinated me – not for its social critique, which sounds more like inspired conversation after a few drinks, but for its density of actuality, the familiarity of its despair. This novel, celebrated for its social sensitivities, works because it points to the mythic core of human behavior – the unchangeable, the returning. The French know, better than anyone, that the coexistence of human beings in relations of equality and freedom is possible. Jean-Jacques Rousseau told them so, and every French school kid learns this. But they also learn that Rousseau was consistently pessimistic that humanity can escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom. Nicolas Mathieu has cast those school kids in his own dark drama.
[Published by Other Press on April 7, 2020, 420 pages, $17.99 paperback]