The village overwhelmingly votes for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front, and, as France has braced itself for the possibility of a Le Pen Presidency, Louis’s book has become the subject of political discussion in a way that novels rarely do. Alcoholism is rampant and violence casual. Children in the village leave school early women have children young one in five adults has difficulty reading and writing. A post-industrial decline has shuttered most of the region’s factories, and jobs are scarce and hard. Hallencourt’s occasional beauty-fruit trees in gardens, explosions of color in the autumn woods-does little, in Louis’s telling, to alleviate the human suffering that takes place there. Much of the extraordinary interest in the book has centered on its depiction of Hallencourt, a village of about fourteen hundred people in Picardy, in the north of France, not far from the sea. Since it was published in France, in 2014, “The End of Eddy,” Édouard Louis’s slim début novel, has sold more than three hundred thousand copies. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for The New Yorker In interviews, Édouard Louis, who is now twenty-four, has said that everything he recounts in the novel is true.
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