“What is your name? My name is Nobody, a name is nothing, like family, like childhood, I don’t believe in it, I don’t want it.” Constance Debré has a grand name – her grandfather was the prime minister who drafted the French constitution – and she’s long been trying to disgrace it. She is driven by a mixture of petulant rebellion, existential longing for erasure and revolutionary anarchism. A decade ago she left behind her husband, job as a criminal defence lawyer, furniture and crockery to embark on a new life of casual sex with women and iconoclastic, fervent writing.
Following Love Me Tender and Playboy, Name is the final instalment in the autofictional trilogy where, with fury, disdain and panache, Debré has recorded her revulsion at bourgeois life and at the legal system that allowed her ex-husband to remove their son because of her homosexual promiscuity and writing. Now, as she witnesses her father dying, she goes further in renouncing family, childhood and the name she hopes can die with him – though it’s nonetheless emblazoned on the cover.
In this book D, the adult Debré, tells the story of her addict parents; we have glimpsed them in previous volumes, but here they come into focus in scenes that bring fairytale elements to her hyper-realism. There’s her father, the elegant war reporter, trying in his own way to disgrace his illustrious name, coming together with a beautiful woman who grew up in a chateau for a violent, ecstatic love affair. They begin with opium, smoking from picturesque pipes while their daughters look on. Then opium becomes scarce so they move on to heroin (“the great equaliser, more effective than unemployment, than Mitterand”), lose their income, home and health, leaving the young Constance to beg them to snap out of it, to parent. Her mother dies when Constance is 16.
Debré’s attitude towards this material is complex and ultimately unresolved. She’s lucky, she rather wildly announces, to have had addict parents, because addicts create their own laws. “Having junkies for parents makes you grow up within a strong moral system.” So there’s a strand here adumbrating a moral system – indeed, her publishers describe it as a manifesto. She wants to do away with inheritance, marriage and the family, and childhood itself. She wants to do away with literature, except possibly Proust. Let’s burn some books! But I felt there was desperation within the bravado with which Debré churns out judgments and injunctions. The book is at its most powerful when feelings too complex for Debré’s own moral systems begin to seep in. Indeed, it is more a breakdown than a manifesto.
In one powerful passage, D is watching a documentary with her lover in bed, when her mother makes an appearance on screen. Her lover asks how she feels, and her answer is wild and blank. “It is stupefying. To see her. Or to remember that all that existed. She. She and I. She for me. She was everything. And then nothing. I tried to find something other than stupefaction, I couldn’t. Not that day and not since. Nothing else is left.” Typically, Debré ends the section here, just when she’s begun to acknowledge the confusion of grief. She shuts the reader out as she shuts out her lovers, until eventually she meets a woman who’s allowed to stick around because she plays along, pretending there’s no real feeling involved: “the word love, of course, is never spoken”.
Heaven forfend I should claim to love her books! Debré’s trilogy has shaken up the French literary scene but it’s gloriously unclear what it amounts to. The French love their rebels, which makes it harder to really be one. For all her claims to be entirely apart from the literary world, Debré has much in common with Edouard Louis, another writer renouncing name and class and denouncing hypocrisy in violently stripped-down prose. Because the working-class Louis is concerned with inequality – with the appalling bodily injustice meted out by the class system – there’s some sense that his books offer a vision of social regeneration. Though their verve and delight comes from his own ascent, with its particular mix of luck, desperate exploitation and loving redemption, they do suggest how change might work on a less makeshift and individual scale.
Debré, on the other hand, offers only destruction, and makes the experience of reading her books wilfully claustrophobic. But perhaps this destruction may be necessary. Angela Carter talked about the Marquis de Sade as a moral pornographer, justified because the destruction pursued by characters such as his Juliette assaults the structures of our social world so much that renewal starts to seem thinkable, even if neither Sade nor Juliette were particularly interested in it. Something similar may be true of Debré’s lurid moral starkness. And certainly for a while after finishing Name, much else I read felt artificially sugary in the book’s aftertaste. Debré makes it harder to be hypocritical; harder to contrive stories about sophisticated made-up people. Name isn’t a manifesto for a new world, but it’s all the more effective as a work of demolition that makes new manifestos possible.
• Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury). Name by Constance Debré, translated by Lauren Elkin, is published by Tuskar Rock (£10.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
