‘La France Desponde’: inside the Gallic far-Right and left-behind

Fathers, Sons & Fascism: it could be a try-hard Hoxton coffee shop. Instead, it’s the heart of Laurent Petitmangin’s excellent What You Need from the Night. A slip of a thing at barely more than 100 pages, this debut novel is a triumph of tamped power and unsutured emotion.

Set in contemporary post-industrial Lorraine – call it La Vallée Heureuse – it follows a father raising his sons after the sudden death by cancer of their mother. She was their keystone; without her, these three lost boys orbit each other, confused and bruised, in the suddenly too-big void of the family home.

Small wonder that the eldest son, once a promising footballer, falls in with the wrong crowd – he’s spotted handing out leaflets for Le Pen and takes to mooching around with the “short-back-and-sides” gang, “their faces filled with arrogance and hatred”. His father, a stolid engineer with rail company SNCF and a loyal attendee at the ageing socialist club, is disgusted; his younger brother, who dreams of escaping to study in Paris, tries to win him back with puppyish affection. Yet after a ghastly act of violence, this fragile trio is torqued irreparably out of shape.

First published in France in 2020, where it won the Prix Femina des lycéens, Petitmangin’s novel carries the heft of a parable. Yet it is also an impressively realised vivisection of an aspect of French society that few British readers – and I’d hazard just as few Parisians – ever experience. La France Desponde: a world where energy and ambition drain away on the weekly TGV to Paris, and the arrival of a new factory – long-promised, never-materialising – is the eternal talk of the town.

As skilfully translated by Shaun Whiteside, Petitmangin’s prose has a spare, plain-speaking rhythm, settling you in the story with the sturdy clunk of a train switching tracks. Flashes of lyricism – figures seen through a windshield are “Chinese shadows on frosted glass” – spark amid the sparseness.

A rich seam of recent French literature, such as Joseph Ponthus’s novel-in-verse À la Ligne and the work of Édouard Louis, has explored the plight of the left-behind. But few achieve so much with so little. Some may find What You Need scaldingly bleak; I marvelled at the compressed clarity of its vision. It’s one of the most exquisite debuts I’ve read for some time – and an early highlight of 2023.

What You Need from the Night is published by Picador at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books