[In the following laudatory review, Laurence discusses stylistic aspects of A Man's Place.]

Reading Annie Ernaux's spare biography/autobiography A Man's Place, one gets the feeling as in her earlier work, A Woman's Story (1991), that writing is a "luxury." Torn between two identities, Ernaux takes possession of the harsh working-class life and language of her parents and the distance that comes between her and her father as the "legacy" of an educated woman writer in a bourgeois world. "Although," she says, "it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love." She opens with the fracture of two moments in her life: "that windy April in Lyon when I stood waiting at the Vroix-Rousse bus stop" after passing the CAPES examination to take her place as a secondary school teacher in the lycée, and "that stifling month in June," the month of her father's death at the age of sixty-seven in a quiet area of Seine-Maritime.

What makes this intentionally "neutral" description of the growing distance between the bright, achieving daughter and the rough-hewn working father so intriguing is that it is both a story of her father and the story of the daughter's struggle for language as a writer writing. As she drifts into middle-class circles, her attempt to come to terms with the life of "necessity" of her parents causes pain, guilt, and alienation: "As I write, I try to steer a middle course between rehabilitating a life-style generally considered to be inferior, and denouncing the feelings of estrangement it brings with it." What is new is Ernaux's self-conscious marking of the two languages that are her legacy, and her effort to find one that will honestly tell the story of a life governed by "necessity." Rejecting the genre of the novel she asserts: "I have no right to adopt an artistic approach … I shall collate my father's words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life…. No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally. It was the same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news." Developing this style of "necessity"—stripped to the bone of fact—almost a ritual of language to honor her father, she delivers direct, brief, social observations: "The land my father worked belonged to others." Such sentences are like gray stones between the flowering language and vision of her subjective terror in looking at him in death: "He was no longer my father. His sunken features seemed to have developed into one large nose. In his dark blue suit, which hung loosely around his body, he looked like a bird lying on its back." Here language is somehow flattened with compressed emotion, and the emotional spaces between the sentences as between the characters yawn wide as the distances between people in a Balthus painting.

Ernaux's seeming dilemma between two languages, two realities in this novel becomes the source of her style and strength as a writer. The strength emerges from a conscious stance of self-division. Her ability to simply limn and balance a stark, neutral language, "legacy" of her parents, with her own nuanced subjectivity grows from her emotional negotiation of the worlds of the working class and the middle class, and, most importantly, from having learned not to mix what goes on inside with what goes on outside.