Lie With Me by Philippe Besson review – a French bestseller

In France Philippe Besson is well known; he’s written almost 20 novels in 18 years, and several have been adapted for film and theatre. He’s been mixed up in politics too, as French writers are prone to be, and in 2017 wrote a novelised account of Macron’s campaign for the presidency. His novel Lie With Me (Arrête avec tes mensonges in French, which is more like “stop your lying”), is a bestseller in France, and a film is already in the making; now it’s been translated into very readable English by the actor and writer Molly Ringwald.

Besson has sometimes drawn on the lives of real individuals – Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, James Dean – for his novels, and he’s apparently made this one out of his own adolescent love story. Lie With Me is set in the same small town in south-western France where he grew up, and is dedicated to a Thomas Andrieu who died in 2016, just as the character Thomas Andrieu does in the novel. The narrator is Philippe Besson, a successful writer living in Paris, remembering his adolescence. Of course we can’t be sure, finally, how much of the story is invented – and perhaps it doesn’t matter.

It’s told economically in fewer than 150 pages. Philippe and Thomas are 17 years old and at school together; they’ve never spoken because Philippe is in those classes that prepare the children of bourgeois families to progress in their education, and Thomas isn’t. Philippe’s father is the headmaster of a primary school; Thomas’s has a small dairy farm and sells the produce of his vineyard to local cognac distilleries, while his mother comes from a family of Spanish migrant labourers. Across the class divide Philippe yearns for Thomas’s beautiful and unattainable self-possession, though he never dares look at him directly. He assumes that Thomas is straight, and oblivious to him – that he “doesn’t know me at all”. Philippe is clear already that he’s gay, and although he doesn’t mind being different (“I wouldn’t follow packs. Out of instinct, I despised packs”), he knows better than to avow it openly to his schoolfriends. One amazing day in the playground, however, it turns out that Thomas has noticed Philippe after all, and has been cherishing a secret passion for him, precisely because he’s different. “Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realise it … Because you will leave and we will stay.” There follow sexual encounters in the secret places Thomas knows: the locker room at the basketball court, a shed next to the football field, eventually in Philippe’s teenage bedroom. The sex is raw and transforming, but they don’t talk much – in public Thomas won’t admit to knowing Philippe. Eventually the strains of shame and secrecy are unbearable, and he leaves to live in Spain with his mother’s family.

Besson’s spare style, with its short declarative sentences, works best in this part of the book, where the rather thin texture is freighted with the specifics of a provincial French town in the 1980s, and with analysis of the complex tensions around class, which confer power briefly on the good-looking peasant boy. Alien details of clothes and teenage social life and pop culture are interesting for an English reader. In the remainder of the novel, though – where a surprise encounter in a Bordeaux hotel lobby opens up the past for the now-famous Philippe, and he finds out what’s become of his old lover – the writing lacks the nostalgic specificity of the adolescent section. Its thinness begins to tell; the sentences just don’t work hard enough. “His father had been lying for too long, he had to come to terms with himself, and now there was an urgency to it.” That may have sounded better in French; and there’s nothing wrong with plainness in writing. But in a good sentence the material pushes back, and language is strenuous in its efforts to perceive what resists comprehension; good style is salty with irony and surprises. Besson’s prose glides along, meeting no resistance.

We don’t feel enough of Thomas’s separate reality, either. When for once, after lovemaking, Thomas is actually talking and telling Philippe about his life, on the page Philippe repeatedly interrupts him, intruding fragments from his own experience as if he can’t bear not to be the centre of his own novel’s attention for even a moment. I once picked grapes too! I too learned how to milk a cow! Oh, you live there – that’s where my grandmother died! The narrator spends too much time backing into his own limelight, and in the end the whole tragic story seems narrated so as to validate and enhance Philippe’s famous-writer persona. Thomas may have been the unattainable love-object, inarticulate and desirable and other, yet everything he did turns out to have been because of Philippe, or addressed to Philippe. Well, maybe it happened like that. Lie With Me is full of Proustian echoes. It’s worth remembering that in Proust’s novel Albertine can’t belong to anyone, no matter how hard they try to possess her: not to the character Marcel, nor to Marcel the writer.

• Lie With Me is published by Penguin (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.