As I’m sure she’s sick of having pointed out, Justine Lévy is the daughter of the French writer Bernard Henri-Lévy – this is even mentioned in the potted biography on the back sleeve, which no doubt pisses her off no end.
Autobiographical fiction is closely associated with young novelists, but it afflicts prose writers of any age. The situation isn’t helped by a literary culture that prides the idiosyncratic and the personal above all else. For a contemporary writer, being interested in politics and society and the outside world is not a good move: at best you are labelled a naïve utopian; at worst accused of the deadly sin of intellectualism. Over the past ten years, young novelists have looked inward, leading to a tide of books by middle class journalists in North London about middle class journalists in North London; saying nothing, yet demanding an audience. The apex of this trend was a thinly disguised autobiographical book titled Thinly Disguised Autobiography. The writer was a man named James Delingpole. The protagonist is a man named Josh Devereux. Sure, it’s good to look inward. But is there that much inside?
Lévy is acutely aware of how her book will be read and judged, and instead of establishing a false separation between her protagonist and herself, she simply demolishes the border altogether. The narrator is called Louise Lévy; her famous father is referred to as ‘BHL’. Appearing on a book show, she tells the host, ‘You can’t change your name if you’re named Lévy (yes, you can say it, my name is Lévy)’. John Irving said that something imagined is better than something remembered. Autobiographical writers want to make their lives seem interesting by giving them the authority of fiction. By ignoring the distinctions, Lévy can provide a good exploration of the pressures of having a famous family.
Of course, anything interesting that happens in life deserves to go in a book. In the course of Nothing Serious (superbly translated by RSB-interviewee Charlotte Mandell) we go through Louise’s pharmacological addiction and her disastrous first marriage and pregnancy. The whole thing is described with breathless precision, in endless run-on sentences that put me in mind of trying to have a conversation in a nightclub. I imagined Lévy banging out this novel in three weeks, throwing in everything that came into her head. Yet it works, it becomes right, not least because of Lévy’s descriptive powers, her eye for detail and her effortless understanding of how humanity works.
The story of Louise’s marriage is particularly significant because her husband Adrien is a pompous dilettante who wants the literary life without having any literary talent. To Adrien, Louise is a gateway into all the right parties, but when she becomes lost in the throes of depression and addiction, she becomes an embarrassment. Adrien is completely at a loss to deal with emotional problems; when he comes home to find Louise in the middle of a panic attack, his response is to start shrieking and run out of the house. One of the most well realised characters in this book, it transpires that Adrien’s pursuit of Louise is spurred purely by jealousy at BHL’s success: ‘He wanted to kill my father, and I was his weapon.’
Our loves and relationships fascinate only ourselves; it’s best to look at these things from the inside. But this is autobiography at its best, mapping without fear or favour the contradictions that go to make up a human being. Justine Lévy is something serious.