The duality of mankind: We need ambition to advance towards an evermore ideal society and we loathe the ambitious if they appear above their station.

Though I suppose there can be qualifiers for the ambitions we hate and the ones we endorse. If your ambition is to find a cure for cancer or reduce our reliance on fossil fuels you can expect praise. This makes sense; pro-social activity generally garners social approval. Our support isn’t restricted to loftily wide ambitions, either. We’ll give two thumbs up to those who rise to become the very best of the best in specific fields. Athletes are one example. Artists another. Of course, should you slip up at the top of your game or be among the vast collective known as the “also-rans”, we’ll absolutely rhetorically slaughter you if a hint of superiority is detected. The key, if you’re looking out for yourself (we all are), is to be extremely discrete about it. That applies from the very famous to the very local.

But what if you just… didn’t care what people thought? In a radical sense, can the ambitious circumvent it all by simply discarding those they leave behind? And what are the implications of that for the discarder and the discardee?

Édouard Louis’s Changer: méthode (translated as Change in English) takes that second path and storms down it. Born in a poverty-ridden commune in northern France, Louis, a gay man, was subject to all the worst kinds of prejudice and bullying humans are capable of dishing out to its marginalized groups. Through years of circumscription, Louis determines that the only way he can survive is to escape. And, of course, the only way to escape in societies like France (or the US) is to violently climb the social ladder. Encouraged by a select group of school staff, he makes it to a lycée in Amiens and begins his journey of radical self-destruction, self-refinement, and self-actualization.

A friend in Amiens opens a door to firmly middle class living, kicking off an arduous process of change that has Louis altering everything from the way he laughs to the way he looks. Having never seriously picked up a book before, he makes up for lost time by reading voraciously at all hours of the day. Visits to his hometown are infrequent and blazing with familial discord. He believes he has made it, but after all, it isn’t unheard of for a provincial to make it to Amiens — in the grand scheme, that is nothing. (I made it from a small suburb in Wisconsin to the Twin Cities. So what? That is nothing.) Making It demands something else.

It demands, as expected, Paris.

Since we’re reading this novel, you are safe in assuming Louis makes it to Paris. He does, in fact, realize his ambitions and is now, I assume, firmly part of the French literati. Congrats to him.

On his way to that summit, though, the suffering he endures and dishes out to others can be hard to stomach. Louis is initially driven by his almost manic need to exact revenge upon the denizens of his hometown, including his family. He demolishes the traces of his youth and frees himself. In the process, he cuts family and friends down at the knees. Having been relentlessly punished simply for who he was as a child Louis has fought his way to an upper hand and can, in turn, relentlessly punish those left behind in his wake. But he also can’t fully shake his origins either. At some point the search for vengeance on his past morphs into a search for vengeance on behalf of those left behind.

I’ve no interest in passing judgement on the path he walked. To regret or revel in his actions isn’t my place. As a work documenting the modernized version of the very bruising path from poverty to security, Change is excellent. If you want to Make It, and I mean really Make It, there is no going halfway. You will hurt and use others to achieve your success, but if you do it right your actions will be met with acclaim by your new social sphere.

Louis just went a step further and put the darkness of his path in the spotlight for us to see. He has my respect for that. And anyways, he’s now so ensconced by success that any disapproval readers may feel of him wouldn’t matter one whit. That’s part of the point.