THE SILENCE AND THE RAGE

Three French siblings are keeping busy in the early 1950s: Journalism, entrepreneurship, murder…

This novel by Prix Goncourt winner Lemaitre is the second in a planned Glorious Years tetralogy (following The Wide World, 2023), starring the Pelletier clan, which in 1952 is highly ambitious and thick with secrets. François, a rising editor at a Paris newspaper, is struggling in his relationship with Nine, a deaf alcoholic kleptomaniac who’s gone missing, while shepherding a blockbuster series on French women’s poor hygiene. His sister, Hélène, is a journalist covering the opening of a dam in the countryside that will flood a provincial town while seeking an illegal abortion. Their brother, Jean, is about to open a second megastore but has to deal with employee protests and a vicious harridan wife, while hoping the papers don’t discover his sideline as a serial killer. Too much? Absurdly so? Mais oui! Which is unfortunate, because there are glimmers here of deep research and emotional sensitivity. Hélène’s plot in particular deals not just with the torments that come with displacing a whole community, but also the country’s draconian anti-abortion laws, which push her to an unlicensed treatment that goes badly. But Lemaitre is so determined to deliver a brash, symphonic novel that his story clangs and strains credulity. Jean’s wife, Geneviève, is cartoonishly evil, blithely cuckolding her husband and glorying in her in-laws’ shortcomings. And a needless subplot features the siblings’ parents sponsoring a mediocre boxer in Beirut who surprisingly fails upward. Lemaitre might intend to reveal the dark side of France’s charming postwar reputation, or perhaps he means to critique the cruelty and violence families bring on each other, knowingly or not. But this manic, pulpy novel makes it hard to trust any serious intention.

A clumsy family saga whose would-be provocations are more comic than harrowing.