Such Fine Boys: A Novel by Patrick Modiano

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Nobel price winner Patrick Modiano‘s Such Fine Boys: A Novel is essentially a series of sad reminiscences about privileged boys at a boarding school outside Paris and what became of them when they grew up. It’s dripping with melancholy, holding out little hope for these lonely, lost men. Modiano seems more concerned with mood than anything else and skims past these people and their experiences without much insight or involvement. I found myself feeling little sympathy for their plights or their lack of judgment.

The writing itself, at least in this translation, seemed stilted and labored. This approach has been used by other French authors, such as Albert Camus and Alain Robbe-Grillet, to great effect. With this material, however, the awkward detachment simply made the reading experience uninvolving. There was neither a central crisis nor a weighty intellectual idea to grip my attention and interest. Time passes, stuff happens–there’s no real insight in that. Maybe if you grew up in France in the 60’s and wanted to feel nostalgic, this would be a great book for you. Or if you were more familiar than I with the social and political turbulence of 60’s France; that’s mostly an ignored background here, unless that was the point–it’s hard to tell, the way it was written.

Some of these characters appear in other Modiano novels, including a young girl named Little Jewel who made for the most interesting vignette. I might try one of those in the future, but while I thought this was an okay read, I wouldn’t recommend it to the uninitiated.