COLLAPSE

The author of The End of Eddy (2017) contemplates his brother’s decline and death.

This mournful novel, along with the simultaneously released (and sunnier) Monique Escapes, marks the end of French novelist Louis’ autofictional saga about his harrowing past. Here, the end comes at the beginning, as the narrator explores his lack of emotion upon hearing the news of his (unnamed) brother’s death at 38. In some regards, it’s because his death wasn’t unexpected: The brother escaped their abusive upbringing by retreating into drugs and alcohol, slowly drinking himself to death. But the brother’s trajectory wasn’t straightforward, and the narrator doesn’t want to excuse his own coldness. So he talks with his brother’s girlfriends, uncovering stories of shocking abuse on his part, as well as outsize kindness; and he recalls moments when his brother treated him with the same generosity. “I’ll never let Father crush you the way he’s crushed me,” the narrator recalls his brother saying. (Louis’ language, deftly translated by acclaimed novelist Aw, is full of distancing maneuvers: In addition to not naming his brother, the narrator also consistently refers to their father as “his father,” rhetorically disowning him.) As the narrator thrived—in part by writing bestsellers about family trauma—his brother worsened, which understandably stokes a degree of guilt, especially when it’s time to discuss paying for his funeral: “I was the traitor, the one who had made money writing books about his family, and it was time to repay my debt…” But the narrator is unwilling to keep his emotions at arm’s length, drawing solace from more intellectual writing about grief by Anne Carson and Joan Didion, and elucidating “facts” that he’s careful not to let slip from the narrative. If this is indeed the end of the saga, as he says, much remains unprocessed, an uncertainty that gives this book a troubling, uncanny tension.

A well-turned study of loss and trauma.