Le petit garçon sur la plage by Pierre Demarty (review)

Written in a poetic, somewhat dreamlike style, this moving short novel is primarily about life's fragility. Although it seems clear that the events are taking place in France, the text's lack of proper names may imply that the action could occur in any developed Western country with a metropolis and a seacoast. When proper nouns are used, something that happens in only one chapter, they are uncapitalized and come from the world news on a single day. The nameless protagonist, a business executive of forty who takes for granted his pleasant life with his wife and two small sons in a bustling city, is shaken by two images which make him burst into tears he does not understand. The first is of a small, helpless child in a horror film who is abandoned on a deserted seacoast; the second is of a news photo that many contemporary readers will remember but that I will not identify to avoid spoiling the book's opening. That photograph is described slowly and repetitively in short, hypnotic sentences and brief paragraphs. The protagonist does not understand his feelings, but readers will know that each image makes him fear for his sons' safety. He feels "ce mélange incompréhensible de joie et de terreur qui s'empare des hommes qui sont des pères" (107). In the last chapter, set a few years later, he must cope with what seems to be the death of his last parent or grandparent in his native village. He and other relatives, perhaps cousins, must empty the family house. Most of the possessions are divided among the relatives or discarded. One senses that these relatives may never be together again, as the death has weakened their connections. Unlike the first chapter, the last consists of a single paragraph fifteen pages long, the rushing sentences implying the protagonist's emotional state. Without understanding it, he suddenly wants to be alone with his now adolescent sons and revisit the nearby beach where they used to play, as if to turn back the clock and avoid life's inevitable losses. Many such losses are caused by the ordinary processes of physical life, but others result from disasters such as the one that left the boy in the book's title on the beach. Demarty knows something first-hand about disasters because he was in Manhattan when the Twin Towers were destroyed and wrote about his experience in a memoir, Manhattan Volcano. In this novel, he shows how experiencing catastrophes merely through fictional films or news reports can make one more aware of one's own vulnerability and that of one's children. Fiction, too, like this unusual novel, may have a similar effect because it draws a reader into a dreamlike world of repetitive actions, unspecified places, and dangerous situations.