Interpretations of a Sexual Assualt
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            In the early morning hours, when Eddy realizes that Reda has attempted to rob him, the encounter turns violent. It’s at this moment that Eddy realizes his one-night-stand has a gun in his coat pocket. When confronted, Reda explodes in anger. “You’re going to pay, I’m going to kill you, you dirty little faggot,” he shouts. Within this drama, Louis takes us inside Eddy’s thoughts. “So that’s it,” he writes, “He hates himself for wanting men. He wants to redeem himself for what he did with you. He wants to make you pay for his desire. He wants to make himself believe that the two of you did all the things you did, not because of his desire, but as a strategy for what he’s doing now, that you didn’t make love, but that this has all been part of a theft.” Such moments of reflective self-awareness simmering within heart-stopping tension erupt throughout this captivating and compelling novel. Reda’s verbal threats eventually turn into ​a violent ​assault​ and rape, leaving ​Eddy bloodied and emotionally unanchored. The entire encounter is thus marked by both desire and rage, intimacy and violence, framing the story’s emotional core.

            Louis has become a literary sensation inside and outside his native France since his first novel, The End of Eddy, was published in 2015. Recounting his life growing up in the working-class town of Hallencourt in the north of France, the novel is filled with scenes of toxic masculinity, xenophobia, and homophobic abuse, all of which Eddy endures at the hands of his classmates and relatives. As autofiction, The End of Eddy is partly the story of Louis’ fraught struggle as a gay man in a poor provincial town and partly a study of the political and economic realities of the French working class at the moment when the far Right was making a powerful appeal to voters.

            In History of Violence, Louis again creates a story that is both personal and social. His writing moves effortlessly between story and analysis. Louis studied sociology at the prestigious École Normale Supérieur in Paris, where he met his mentor, the philosopher and historian Didier Eribon, whose own memoir Returning to Reims (2009) recounts his experiences growing up gay in a working-class town. For both writers, social analysis is more than theory; it is a way to embody the intersections of sex and class.

            It is this intersection that History of Violence explores so well, giving us psychologically acute moments that carry the novel ever deeper into the emotional and intellectual effects of Reda’s attack and rape of Eddy. It is rare for a novelist to move so easily between the particulars of the personal and the larger impact of the social. Louis does this with an almost unrelenting self-examination as he explores the aftermath of the rape, from his encounters with hospital staff and interviews with the police (after he reluctantly agrees to report the crime) to recounting the experience to friends and family. Each retelling gives the experience a different meaning, underscoring the limitations of language to capture the physical and emotional injury.

            The novel is told through Eddy’s sister Clara, who conveys her understanding of the encounter and its aftermath to her husband as the two sit in their kitchen. Eddy, in a room nearby with the door slightly ajar, listens to this retelling, occasionally interjecting his own parenthetical clarifications and additions to the story. This technique resists the usual cliché about the slipperiness of truth, or how a story is modified by the second telling. Instead, it forces us to consider how stories we tell of ourselves often take on a life of their own as they ebb and flow among friends, family, and strangers. For Louis, it is not about the story being right, but rather how the story is shaped and reshaped depending on who is telling it and who is listening.

            This is made acutely powerful at the police station. “I no longer recognized what I was saying,” Eddy writes about his attempt to explain the attack. The police ask questions that shape the story “in the form that they imposed on my account,” he writes. The police continue to refer to Reda as an “Arab,” as if that explained the violence itself. Also, his straight interrogators take a dim view of Eddy’s decision to bring home a stranger. Eddy’s frustration is tempered by the recognition that by making the police report, he has created a space for the emotional and physical injury to have a place in the world beyond himself. Such paradoxical moments of frustration and relief sit at the heart of this novel, forcing us to confront the complex emotional and intellectual ambiguity that Eddy confronts as the novel’s protagonist and its narrator.

            History of Violence is a brilliant and difficult novel. Louis has been compared to writers such a Jean Genet and two of his acknowledged influences, William Faulkner and James Baldwin. His novels are more than personal stories; they inhabit a certain sociological imagination of queer experience. Homosexuality in his writing is a way into social truths. Some critics have found fault with this aspect of his work—particularly reviewers in the U.S. But such critics fail to appreciate how even the most painful and tragic episodes in life are as much intellectual as they are emotional. “To write Eddy,” Louis noted in a Paris Review interview a few years ago, “was a means of seeing Eddy’s tears as the product of the entire history of homophobia, of masculine domination, and of social violence which had preceded them.” He added: “I understood that even our tears are political. That’s why this book is both a novel and an analysis.” In History of Violence, Louis has again shown how powerful such an approach can be in illuminating contemporary queer experience.