A Gay Writer’s Nostalgia for a Teenaged Love Affair
A review of ‘Lie with Me’ by Philippe Besson
Lie With Me (2017) is a melancholy coming-of-age story in which two teenage lovers, who happen to be gay males and whose tender affair brings them into a kind of tortured adulthood, are delicately and convincingly portrayed.
The first time I read this novel, a few years ago, I didn’t like it, probably because of the author’s irritating habit of changing verb tense without apparent literary purpose. There is also a tendency, at least early in the novel, to provide information that is both unnecessary and irrelevant to the plot and the theme of the story, and therefore distracting to the reader.
The first-person narrator, Philippe, tells us, for example, that he is with his friends Nadine, Genevieve, and Xavier at their small-town school. “Their faces are engraved in my memory when many others, more recent, have deserted me. They aren’t the ones I’m interested in though . . .” And we barely hear of these friends again; we certainly do not learn anything about them and how they might have influenced or protected or fallen away from the narrator.
Much of the time when Philippe is with these friends, he is in fact not with them because all he can see is a boy in the distance, a boy “with shaggy hair, the hint of a beard, and a serious look.” The slender boy is silent and distant, and there is “a border that stands between us. Maybe it’s contempt. Disdain, at the very least.” His name is Thomas Andrieu, and when Thomas comes into the picture, we get it that Philippe Besson can tell a moving and memorable story.
Thomas is unapproachable. Partly because he is in a different section or class at the school, but more critically because the narrator is believed by his schoolmates, and perhaps some teachers, to “prefer boys.” Other observations and comments are made, confirming his gayness, and he regularly hears remarks like “dirty fag” and “faggot” directed at him.
Philippe indeed prefers boys, and he feels no guilt or shame about his attraction. At the age of eleven, well before going through puberty, he has regular sex with another boy in the village. “By puberty we would become even more imaginative.” He sees nothing wrong with deriving pleasure from sex with another boy, and he is happy to be different from “the pack.” He despises packs. Even when the bullying becomes intense in high school, he refuses to make any attempt to change who he is.
Philippe observes Thomas over time, and his attraction grows. Thomas is a loner despite his attractiveness to both boys and girls. “He also likes his solitude. It’s obvious. He speaks little, smokes alone. . . I think I love him for his loneliness, that it’s what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.”
To his surprise, Thomas has been noticing Philippe watching him; he appears at the narrator’s locker one day and suggests that they eat lunch at a café in town rather than in the school lunchroom.
The meeting in the café at the edge of town marks the beginning of a sexual affair, necessarily clandestine because Thomas, a farm boy who knows he will spend his life on the farm, is deeply in the closet. “Thomas Andrieu says that no one can know, everything must stay hidden. That is the condition: take it or leave it. . . I follow his lead, accepting the rules of the game.”
The affair is also temporary, as both boys know, because Philippe, an outstanding student, will certainly leave their small town to attend some prestigious college. Nevertheless, the affair will change their lives forever.
Thomas is like Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain. He is tightly reserved and utterly unable to conceive of a life for himself as an openly gay man. He is trapped in a conventional existence in which he cannot ever be himself. Rather than being put off by Thomas’s reserve, Philippe is intrigued, attracted, and he soon falls in love with this strange boy.
The sex, although clandestine and marked by the danger of discovery, is good; it is mutual and unreserved. And it is described beautifully by the author as he does not give in to gratifying scenes but portrays the graphic sex as part of a journey toward love.
The story is told by the adult Philippe, who has moved to Paris and is a well-known novelist. It is an unexpected encounter there with a young man who strikingly resembles Thomas that sets off the tale, touched with nostalgia, of their adolescent affair. The young man turns out to be the key to the unfolding of the later part of the story.
Lie With Me, which is tinged with tragedy — a tragedy that is foreshadowed by the sudden death years earlier of the narrator’s grandmother on the lone country road that leads into Thomas’s village — remained with me in a cloud of melancholy after I had finished reading it.
The novel has been made into a compelling film. The movie’s director shifts the focus of the story to the adult Philippe, who makes a fateful return to the small town in which he and Thomas had their brief but life-altering affair. The young man who so closely resembles Thomas is also visiting the town, and it is their tense interaction that moves the story toward its shocking climax and its touching resolution. You can view the movie’s trailer here:
