Jeanne Rivière

In “Leurs enfants après eux” (Actes Sud, 2018), Nicolas Mathieu tells the story of a generation growing up over four summers in the dying industrial region of Lorraine: In the fictional town of Heillange, Anthony, Hacine, and Stéphanie drift between gravel pits, disused blast furnaces, and familial fault lines through a youth whose promises – advancement, freedom, self-definition – prove to be structurally blocked, so that even their most intense experiences of love, violence, or friendship remain constantly bound to the gravity of a space that no longer produces a future; the novel condenses this experience into a choral panorama in which individual biographies appear less as autonomous life stories than as variations on a collective fate of invisibility. In contrast, “Connemara” (Actes Sud, 2022) shifts the perspective to the present and to a different phase of life: Using Hélène, the seemingly successful social climber, and Christophe, who remained in his original social milieu, Mathieu tells the story of the illusion of social mobility itself – Hélène’s return from the Parisian elite to the provinces reveals her upward mobility as a story of alienation, while Christophe embodies the flip side, a life of continuity without departure, so that their fleeting reunion makes visible the impossibility of a coherent identity between origin and self-conception; the titular place of longing remains pure projection, a name for a life not lived. The essay reads both novels as a diptych that elevates the geographical space of périphérique France from mere backdrop to epistemic center: space appears here as an instrument of knowledge in which the contradictions of French meritocracy materialize, and the characters act as bearers of social positions whose scope for action is predetermined by origin, class, and symbolic orders. Mathieu's poetics are described as a tension between social-realist precision and literary economy—as a writing of ellipsis that, through choral structure, free indirect style, and the imbuing of landscape, body, and everyday details, generates a universal resonance without ever tipping into abstraction; at the same time, this writing insists that the implicit social critique lies not in explicit theses, but in the narrative form itself, in convergence without catharsis, in the "malgré tout" of precarious happiness, or in the "cœur en miettes" of an unfulfilled existence. This creates the image of a work that neither morally privileges ascent nor stagnation, but understands both as variants of the same double bind – and herein lies the political power of its literature.