portrait of the paraplegic as a young man
[ad_1]
“Le Lâche” (The Coward), by Jarred McGinnis, translated from English (United States) by Marc Amfreville, Métailié, 338 p., €22, digital €10.
Confined to a wheelchair at the age of 26, Jarred fumes, stamps his feet, loses his temper, screams and, at the slightest annoyance, sends flying objects within reach. But what undermines him is not so much his disability as a lifetime marked by frustration and injury. After a car accident that claimed the life of his girlfriend, Melissa, and deprived him of the use of his legs, he is forced, due to lack of medical insurance and stable income, to return to live with his father. , Jack, whom he has not seen since he fled their Texas home ten years earlier. It’s one more misadventure for this young man who has still not overcome the death of his mother when he was 11, nor his father’s bouts of violence.
The purpose of the first novel by American Jarred McGinnis, whose starting point is autobiographical, is to describe the attempt to normalize relations between the two men, when both had sunk into excess after the tragedy: the alcoholism for the father, a wandering of ten years (with drugs, squat…) for the son. The novelist manages quite well to account for the jagged evolution of these relationships, the protagonists constantly oscillating between a desire for reconciliation and settling of tough scores, against a backdrop of guilt and resentment. It is not easy, indeed, for Jarred to find an opponent commensurate with his anger. Especially since Jack, “peaceful widower”now sober, spends most of his time feeding his orchids, and is quite clumsy when it comes to talking to his son.
Dialogue writing
Through these profound dissimilarities, this explosive duo inevitably brings to mind Untouchables, the film by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (2011), in which a man who had become a paraplegic found his smile again thanks to a carer who was radically different from him. Jarred McGinnis uses a dialogue writing that is often more cinematographic than literary. But where Untouchables played the card of frank comedy, the novel deploys a humor that is alternately dark, scathing or frankly desperate, which avoids all self-pity to offer a kind of ferocious portrait, all in self-mockery, of a young adult well forced to assume and settle down.
Despite some clichés, this long-awaited novel – it was voted one of the best books of 2021 by the British daily The Guardian and the BBC – proves convincing in its description of the change in the way society looks at a disabled person: an additional difficulty for those who, like Jarred, are trying to adjust to their new condition as a disabled person. “The wheels, the chair become my wheels, my chair. Well-meaning people who push you up an incline without asking you have no idea what an intrusion into your personal space that is.” can we read from the pen of the novelist, who speaks with full knowledge of the facts.
You have 16.44% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
[ad_2]
Source link
