Hélène and Philippe, a couple of professionals with two children, returned to live in the provinces in the east of France, in Nancy — which is not pronounced, no, as in a song by Lucien Francœur —, after prestigious studies and an early career in consulting firms in Paris.
On paper, after a first burnoutHélène seems to have it all, “an architect’s house, a job with responsibilities, a family like in She, a pretty good husband”. However, there is a flaw in her that is growing day by day.
Christophe has never left and hasn’t moved much either since he was Hélène’s teenage fantasy. Former star hockey player turned dog food salesman, he lives with his father and takes care of the little boy he had with his first girlfriend. At forty, the hair is thinner, the shirts are tighter. The man fights weakly against “the feeling of waste, weariness and the impossibility of going back”.
The protagonists of Nicolas Mathieu’s third novel, Connemarawhich refers to the grandiloquent song of Michel Sardou, evolve in a tonality very similar to that which bathed Their children after them (Actes Sud, Goncourt Prize 2018). For them too, when they became adults, “life became this series of predictions, of minute trimmings, of painless deprivations compensated by always insufficient pleasures.”
In continuity or repetition, Connemara moves back and forth between adolescence and middle age for Hélène and Christophe, between the mid-1990s and 2017, when the echoes of the 2017 presidential elections are heard, when the country had “become this terrible pressure cooker ready to jump”.
That’s what makes Nicolas Mathieu, who is very skilful in reconstructing this world and these lives, a kind of anthropologist of France over the past 25 years. Regional political issues, local cultural references, popular idioms and corporate jargon (with its many Anglicisms) fuel the very “Franco-French” hyperrealism of this gifted novelist. At the risk of alienating some foreign readers.