Queerness is the key that springs Eddy from the various cycles—of poverty, of alcoholism, of violence—that he sees as determining life in the village. “Being attracted to boys transformed my whole relationship to the world,” he writes, “encouraging me to identify with values that were different from my family’s.” This doesn’t mean that queerness represents freedom; it’s an “unknown force that got hold of me at birth and that imprisoned me in my own body.” While his parents regard his mannerisms as a choice, “some personal aesthetic project that I was pursuing to annoy them,” Louis considers not only his desires but also elements of cultural style often coded as queer to be corporeal, determined in and by the body: “I had not chosen my way of walking, the pronounced, much too pronounced, way my hips swayed from side to side, or the shrill cries that escaped my body—not cries that I uttered but ones that literally escaped through my throat whenever I was surprised, delighted, or frightened.”

The sense that his sexual identity is hardwired and essential is shared by his tormentors. After he’s discovered having sex with some friends, Eddy wonders why they escape the bullying directed at him. The adult Louis, echoing the philosopher Michel Foucault, realizes that “the crime was not having done something, it was being something.”

Throughout the novel, Louis catalogues the baffling contradictions of the world of his childhood: brutal racism next to friendliness toward the village’s single person of color; his father’s scorn for the bourgeoisie and his hope that Eddy will join their ranks; the villagers’ hatred of government, which they insist must take action against immigrants and sexual minorities. Describing his mother’s incoherent politics, Louis cites Stefan Zweig’s account of peasant women who protested at Versailles and then shouted “Long live the King!” at the sight of Louis XVI: “their bodies—which had spoken for them—torn between absolute submission to power and an enduring sense of revolt.”

Above all, Louis is perplexed by the simultaneous pride and humiliation that his parents and their neighbors feel for their particular way of life. But he comes to believe that these seeming contradictions appear paradoxical only because of his own manner of looking at things. Of his mother, he writes, “It was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values—values I’d adopted precisely in order to construct a self in opposition to my parents”:

I came to understand that many different modes of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, as she would say, she’d made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids, and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other.

Louis, who has edited a collection of essays on Bourdieu, uses such theory-inflected language throughout the novel. As analysis, his comments don’t take us very far: he doesn’t dissect which “modes of discourse intersected” in his mother, or how or why they “existed only in relation to each other.” Passages like this often do little more than align his observations with common reference points in French social theory, especially Bourdieu and Foucault. Some of them echo more academically rigorous passages in “Returning to Reims,” which also attempts to explain the shift of the working classes in France from leftist political parties to the National Front.

For the novelist, there’s a danger in this kind of language. Structures become visible through abstraction at the cost of suppressing local variation and noise, the apparently aberrant, the individual. It’s out of such noise that novels are made. French critics have compared Louis with Zola, who also wrote about the French working classes in novels informed by sociological theories. But Zola, in a novel like “L’Assommoir,” sticks close to individual lives and experiences, without importing the language of specialists. The abstractions that Louis deploys can flatten out novelistic texture, rendering invisible any details that they can’t accommodate. This problem is suggested in passages where Louis speaks of “the simplicity of those who possess little,” or of a specific incident as “the first in an endless series, each time the same—down to the tiniest details.”

Louis is a canny writer, however, and he signals his awareness of this danger in the novel’s first lines. “From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don’t mean to say that I never, in all of those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn’t fit into its system.” The word that Lucey renders as “all-consuming” is more discomfiting in the French original: “La souffrance est totalitaire.” “The End of Eddy” is a dark book, but it isn’t an entirely joyless one; nor is it “totalitarian.” If the narrator occasionally offers a reductive view of his world, the novel itself doesn’t exclude what falls outside his system. Its characters act in ways that offer the novelistic pleasure of surprise.

This is especially true of Eddy’s father, who is introduced in the novel’s first pages as an almost gothic figure, taking startling delight in the everyday violence of rural places. He kills a litter of kittens by placing them in a plastic shopping bag and slamming it against concrete; he drinks the warm blood of pigs he has slaughtered. He joins eagerly in the brawls that are part of the rituals of manhood and falls victim to the alcoholism that is the plague of the village. And yet, despite having been brutalized by his own father, he never hits his wife or his children, breaking a cycle that Louis elsewhere suggests is invincible. In one agonizing scene, the father allows himself to be beaten, refusing to strike back as he shields Eddy from his older brother’s drunken rage. For all the shame he feels at Eddy’s effeminacy, he repeatedly assures him of his love. When Eddy’s mother tells him stories of his father as a young man, when he struck out for a new life, travelling to Toulon and becoming best friends with an Arab man, she expresses bewilderment: “It don’t make sense, when he says we should kill all the ragheads but then when he lived in the Midi his best mate was a raghead.” That attempt to change his life failed, and it may be irrelevant to structural analysis; Louis doesn’t try to explain it. But it is not irrelevant to the human interest, which is to say the novelistic richness, of character.