Ernaux + Ellis
Returning to the trap is half the pleasure
“When it comes to one’s past, all you have is what’s there. And by some cunning of reason all the experiences you’ve had come to bear on what you do as a writer.”
This is Rachel Kushner, talking to Brett Easton Ellis on his podcast four years ago, replying to his question about growing up lower middle class. Ellis has a new novel out, The Shards, a sprawling work of autofiction that transports us back to a very specific slice of upper-class white Los Angeles circa 1981. Ellis is not my usual fare, but in what strikes me as a particularly Ellis-like scene, I found myself in Santa Monica in the spring of 2023 being recommended the novel over a glass of very nice red by the husband of a very old, good friend. (When do the partners of our good friends become our friends, or are they always stuck with the honorific?) I’m a sucker for novels recommended with a lot of passion. I like a read that comes with it the awareness that someone else has been through these pages and enjoyed it.
Kushner and Ellis are both California writers. Kushner reviewed The Shards for Harpers:
[T]he wealth and surfaces of Ellis’s world are foreign to me—his Eighties are not my Eighties—but I don’t read for relatability. And strangely, unapologetic novelists from the upper echelons, Rachel Cusk and Edward St Aubyn are two other examples, tend to be especially good at writing about class, I mean their own class, because they have nothing to prove, or to obscure, while most writers, I’d wager, descend from some brackish combination of social levels and do not have one consistent class identity from which to draw when building their fictional worlds. They have instead a set of contradictions and anxieties they might try to smooth out rather than explain.
All other class identities are complicated, but being rich is clarifying. Wealth as a recipe for consommé. I liked this categorizing of Ellis because I found myself on the flight back to LA unable to stop reading The Shards. A TransAmPorsche 924 and a sporty green 450SELs with a chestnut interior. Lunches at the Polo Club. And of course the rich do things the rest of us do. Ellis returns again and again to what films are screening in LA—the Ellis of the book scanning listings to find the right film at the right place at the right time. Behavior I remember doing myself when I first lived alone in Chicago. The creepiness of the book is not the ultra violence or wealth, it’s the small details of being young, attempting to navigate the world.
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On Monday my friend Kate texted me Rachel Cusk writing about Annie Ernaux for the NYT Magazine. Cusk, one of Kushner’s upper echelon writers, recounts how after relocating to Paris (quiet luxury alert!) she is asked to join a French television program to discuss Ernaux’s Nobel.
There was a general feeling that Annie Ernaux had somehow escaped appreciation, had been denied justice in her own country. Despite the French reverence for literature, it had required non-French eyes to see her true worth. The Anglophone world, for instance, had long understood her importance — it was seemingly as a witness to this debatable notion that I was invited to participate in the special edition of “La Grande Librairie.”
I hadn’t read Ernaux before she was awarded the Nobel. I don’t remember picking up A Man’s Place, but I dated it 30 October 2022, so I must have purchased it in the weeks after the prize was announced. I knew Ernaux only from passing mention by another French writer, Didier Eribon, who cites her in his work about moving between classes, particularly as an intellectual. In A Man’s Place, Ernaux revisits her childhood, her family, her place, through the lens of her father:
Now it is imperative that I unravel these memories, all the more so since I have long suppressed them, believing them to be of no consequence. If they have survived, it is through sheer humiliation. I surrendered to the will of the world in which I live, where memories of a lowly existence are seen as a sign of bad taste.
Cusk argues Ernaux’s power is the in the taboos she broke about how women are allowed to describe their lives. Which is true, but she misses the extra layer that Ernaux herself did this while also changing class. The rich have always been able to live, and write about it, with a careless ease. Pick up the gorgeous new translation of Cheri! The harder trick is climbing the ladder far enough to have the space and time to write, and then looking back to tell the story. “We lived in close proximity to shit,” Ernaux writes in The Years, “It made us laugh.”
Other than the accident of reading Rachel Kushner on Ellis and Rachel Cusk on Ernaux in the same week, I’m not sure I would have put the two as bookends. But now that I have, I can’t shake it. Ellis and Ernaux, both unafraid of letting violence return with the memory.