Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan – review
Saturday 23 November 2013
The line between fiction and non-fiction can blur into a zone of shadow and uncertainty. What is the "true" story, when memories of it differ widely and all contain great gaps? The difficulty of ever answering Pontius Pilate's question, "What is truth?", leads some writers to treat the difference between factual and fictional accounts as trivial.
People who live under a dictatorship know better. Borges said "All history is fiction," but he didn't say: "All fiction is history." To recognise that all historians invent isn't to say that it doesn't matter if a fiction is called history. Despite the shadow zone of overlap, the distinction is there.
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| Delphine de Vigan Photo by Miguel Medina |
What you call it matters. If you say your story is made up, your fake facts may be of great value as inventions revealing truth. But if you say your made-up story is non-fiction, your faked facts are lies.
Those are rather inflexible rules, and many writers choose to break them. Fiction has always comfortably contained a vast amount of fact and history; now non-fiction is claiming the right to an ever larger proportion of invention. A few memoirists, faking a little too vigorously, have gained a succès de honte, but most semi-factual memoirs are accepted without question. A modern preference for non-fiction may account for the increase in what might be called non‑factual non-fiction.
The cover flap of Delphine de Vigan's book, which is translated by George Miller, calls it a novel. I don't think it is a novel, but I respect the author's honesty in not calling it a memoir. The first part of it, the portrait and history of a family, combines apparently factual accounts drawn from interviews and other sources, with long passages of fiction: inventions by the author-character – descriptions of scenes she did not witness, thoughts she imagines in the minds of people alive before she was born.
To me these are the finest part of the book. Because the author-character openly discusses her rights and responsibilities in trying to reconstruct the family in which her mother grew up, there's no moral queasiness, no need to ask "Is that true or are you making it up?" And because her skill and powers of invention are superb, the imagined passages are completely satisfying.
What's more, the material is fascinating in itself: an improbably large French family, remarkable for beauty, vitality, talent, irresponsibility, alienation, and tragedy – absolutely the stuff of novels.
Then, about midway, the book changes tone and subject. Abandoning overt invention, it becomes a more conventional memoir: a daughter's portrait of a fascinating, unstable mother who survived madness at a high cost to herself and both her daughters, and at last killed herself.
Autobiographies and memoirs have made such a subject curiously familiar – less original, and perhaps less valuable, than the attempt to imagine how a family inevitably seen and described as "happy" shaped one of its children to become that unhappy woman.
This is not one of those tiresome books where the "inner child" is allowed to whine about its parent. Whether or not De Vigan is identical with the author-character, her portrait of the mother, Lucile, as an elusive girl who becomes a deeply troubled woman, is compassionate and powerful, as well as painful and shocking. Still, we've been here before. The many memoirs of addiction, senile dementia and insanity run the same risk: extreme pathology devalues personhood, devours the individual. As doctors speak of a patient as "the new cancer in Room 121", a reviewer might feel like saying "the new bipolarity novel …"
So what I will remember from Nothing Holds Back the Night is not the last half, written in an increasingly bare, dry style that signals painful factuality, the paragraphs growing shorter till they are almost telegraphic and often banal. I will remember the first half, where the luminous accuracy of the prose reminds me of Colette, where the mixture of reported reminiscence, family legend and empathetic invention is so effective, and where the Poirier family – parents and children – appear in a kind of Renoir sunlight, overflowing with life and vibrant personalities, almost enough to conceal the lurking darkness.
In a passage of self-examination, the author-character writes: "I probably set out to pay homage to Lucile, to give her a coffin made of paper – for these seem the most beautiful of all to me – and a destiny as a character. But I know too that I am using my writing as a way of looking for the origin of her suffering, as though there were a precise moment when the core of her self was breached in a definitive, irreparable way …"
Whether that quest can ever be fulfilled, her book is what her delicate and mysterious metaphor promises – a beautiful paper coffin, inscribed with words chosen with painful care and tenderness.
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