Mammals

The protagonist of emerging French author Mérot’s English-language debut—it was published in France in 2003—is known simply as “the uncle,” a man defined only through his relationship to his family. The uncle is, without a doubt, a loser. He’s a 40-year-old drunk who lives in a tiny apartment and has little to no success with women. He falls in and out of jobs with little concern, until he ends up teaching in a secondary school filled with women who aren’t interested in him. “If it is possible to die—physically die—for want of love, then the uncle is dying,” Mérot writes. And yet, there’s little the uncle does to stay the executioner’s hand.

The mammals of Mérot’s title refer to the uncle’s parents, and more generally to his family at large. Like fiction’s most sympathetic losers, the rest of the uncle’s family is a walking reminder of what success could have been like for him. The book even begins with a play off Tolstoy’s famous opener from Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mérot’s update: “Every model family should have a failure: a family without a failure is not truly a family, because it lacks an element that challenges it, thereby reinforcing its legitimacy.”The almost taxonomic tone of that opening line sets the mood for the rest of the book, as the uncle takes stock of his family with almost scientific rigor. The result is a brief, melancholic novel—it clocks in at fewer than 200 pages—infused with the blackest of humor, as Mérot piles depressing aphorisms on top of one another: “Nobody can live permanently as part of a couple. Those who do so are not wonderful romantics but profoundly depressed individuals,” or “Work is one of the principal causes of human misery, the other is love.”

Wynne’s translation is a marvel, considering the subtlety and wryness of so much of Mérot’s language. Many of the jokes and bons mots would fall flat if they were not pitch-perfect. Hearteningly, Mammals remains a fun little novel about depression.—Jonathan Messinger