Publisher: Other Press

ISBN: 978-1892746-77-1

And Their Children After Them, Nicolas Mathieu's second novel (translated from the French by William Rodamor), won France's prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt. That's one reason to read it.

Another, of course, is that it's an engaging and absorbing portrayal of a slice of French life with which most of us are entirely unfamiliar.

The title comes from the Wisdom of Sirach (also known as the Book of Ecclesiasticus): "There are others who are not remembered, as if they had never lived, who died and were forgotten, they, and their children after them." Those are the lives Mathieu evokes: small lives in a small town.

The novel begins in the summer of 1992, jumps to 1994, to 1996, and finally to 1998. It follows a group of teenagers in the imaginary French town of Heillange, a formerly prosperous (if noisy and polluted) steel-making town. Now the blast furnaces are derelict, the workers unemployed, underemployed, or pensioned off, and their children are pretty much on their own.

In 1992, a heatwave is broiling Heillange, weed is in sort supply, and a song by Nirvana "that usually made you want to smash a guitar or set fire to your school" is spreading like a virus. Fourteen-year-old Andrew Casati is bored out of his skull. Lazing around the dull side of the local lake, Anthony and his cousin decide to steal a canoe to find out what it's like on the other side, at the famous nudist beach. The choices Anthony makes that day shape everything that happens in the rest of the novel, from an enduring crush to a collision with a boy named Hacine, son of Moroccan parents, who lives in a decaying housing project.

Children is a picaresque novel that follows Andrew, his parents, his friends, his enemies, and their parents. The book is stuffed with characters, but Mathieu moves easily from the point of view to another, from Andrew's alcoholic father as his marriage collapses to Hacine who deals drugs. These are working-class teens who smoke dope, drink far too much, and, in the heat of the moment, engage in unprotected sex.

The book, however, is more than the comings and goings of the characters, interesting as those are; Mathieu wants more; he wants to show the effects of immigration and globalization without preaching. For example, here's Hacine's father:

He "had emigrated from a poor country and found something of a refuge in Heillange. At the steel mill, he had taken orders for forty years, while being punctual, falsely docile, and an Arab, always. He very quickly understood that the hierarchy at work was determined by more than skills, seniority, or diplomas. Among the workers there were three classes. The lowest was reserved for blacks and North Africans like himself. Above him were the Poles, Yugoslavs, Italians, and the least competent French. To get any job higher than that, you had to be born in France; that was all there was to it."

While the novel tells a number of stories, it has no neat plot, no inciting incident, rising tension, climax, and resolution. It does have fascinating snapshots of French life, conventions, and expectations. Anthony, for example, sees no future in Heillange. He "passed the technological baccalauiréat without having to take the orals, and also without any illusions about what would happen next." He joins the Army, injures a knee playing soccer, the Army washes him out, and he returns to Heillange. So much for escaping your fate.

Mathieu was born in Épinal, France, in 1978. His first novel, Aux animaux in la guerre, was published in 2014. He says he was visiting an old postindustrial site to get some documentation in a small town call Uckange. It was late and the place was deserted. He knew he wanted to write about teenagers and deindustrialization, about a small town and youth. He was listening to music when suddenly a live version of Bruce Springsteen's The River came on. Springsteen speaks about his youth, relationships with his father, etc., and then the song begins. It inspired Mathieu to tell the same story, one of father and son dynamics, of appetites, and of limits.