Édouard Louis's 'Collapse': A Brother's Death and the Power of Literature to Make Sense of Tragedy

The Lead

At 33, the French writer Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his latest work, "Collapse," translated by novelist Tash Aw, Louis describes his eldest brother's death, at 38, from complications relating to alcoholism. The novel takes the form of a metaphysical inquest into the brother's decline, exploring their complex relationship through various literary forms.

A Brother's Complex Legacy

"I felt nothing at the announcement of the death of my brother," Louis begins; "not sadness or despair or joy or pleasure." The reasons for his coldness soon become clear. His brother was violently homophobic, his drinking once prevented Louis from sleeping before a crucial exam, and after "The End of Eddy" came out, his brother went looking for him with a baseball bat. When Louis discusses with his mother and sister how to pay for his brother's funeral and admits, "yes, I would have let him be buried like a dog," we understand why.

The Literary Exploration of Grief

Collapse takes the form of a metaphysical inquest into the brother's decline. Louis has said that the book was in various drafts a play, a diary and a manifesto – experiments that can all be glimpsed in the final product, which is a self-conscious hodgepodge of forms including witness testimony, a scripted dialogue between the author and his brother's ghost and key scenes presented as numbered facts.

Class Destiny and Personal Tragedy

Long-term readers of Louis will be familiar with his tentative political diagnosis. His brother, ensnared 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 these conclusions are too pat for Louis. "My friends have clear ideas yet I don't know, I don't know," he writes.

The Wound That Never Healed

Reaching for fresh perspectives, he turns to literature: Catullus, Freud, Foucault, Joan Didion. His reading helps Louis find the distance he needs to think of his brother in new ways. Louis describes his brother's 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, pierced by the Holy Spear, in Wagner's Parsifal. Though more mundane in provenance, Louis's brother's Wound is equally insurmountable.

Contrasting Paths: Brother and Mother

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 in which he was ensnared and it took his death to make a kind of redemptive sense of his life, 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, indicting a person at their worst, but also liberating.

The Future of Louis's Family Saga

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. "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."