LIE WITH ME

A bestselling French writer—or at least the novelized version of
a bestselling French writer—reckons in older age with a passionate affair he
had as a young man.

Written in an almost confessional first-person, Besson’s (His
Brother, 2005, etc.) latest is a French bestseller set in the mid-1980s in
a small, “gray” Bordeaux town “doomed to disappear.” The narrator, an
ambitious high school student and son of the principal, falls deeply for a fellow
student, the “slender and distant” Thomas Andrieu, a character in the novel but
also apparently an actual person to whom the novel is dedicated. Thomas is
beautiful but not worldly; he’s a sensitive, stunted stud who doesn’t see a way
out of the town. Different as he and the narrator are, they nonetheless
initiate an affair that takes place in hidden rooms on campus and at the
narrator’s home when his parents aren’t around. Besson’s initial reluctance to
put names to their sex acts (“I am enthralled by his sex,” the narrator
writes, as if it’s 1822) feels musty, though the author does get more
descriptively honest as the story progresses. The love between the two feels
real and memorable, and Besson is a thoughtful writer who can strike home with
vivid imagery, particularly as he and Thomas age and grow apart and Thomas’
son, Lucas, develops a friendship of sorts with the narrator. The only quibble
is that this book, which is deftly translated, doesn’t exactly feel like a
novel; it reads like a memoir. In fact, the only thing that keeps it from being
garden-variety autofiction is Besson’s willingness to wink at his decision to
make fictional an experience that seems to be based in reality.

An insightful reminder that in the years before gay dating apps
zapped the mystery out of erotic pursuit, love between even mismatched men
could be lifesaving.