It is a cliché to suggest that an immigrant is always an immigrant. Still more of a cliché to suppose that immigrants never feel quite at home, that a longing for one’s homeland and all that comes with it forever colors their experiences. Frédéric Courtois’s debut autobiographical novel THE WEIGHT OF PRESENCE certainly dallies with these points, but does so from an intriguing perspective: What happens when the immigrant in question never felt quite at home in the first place?
Like Courtois, the novel’s protagonist, Frédéric Martin, comes from near the Vosges in eastern France. He is a bastard, forever instilled with “the hollow feeling I carried but could not locate,” and from a home in a run-down neighborhood populated mostly by Roma (in which his mother continues a vestigial, physically abusive relationship with his stay-away father). His childhood was disfigured by repeated, traumatic meetings with death: a good childhood friend, murdered; a grandfather passing suddenly after pouring out his heart about his times as a member of the French Resistance. Grief became, as he puts it, “the quiet thread” in his life. By the 1980s, Frédéric was growing up and became a wanderer, “trying to be nowhere in particular”—flitting on and off trains, hitchhiking, and the like. Before long the wanderlust brought him to America, where he worked on a Texas ranch, fetched up in Mexico, then Monterey, and the like.
Frédéric’s circumstances are related with Plathian detachment. Descriptions are elegant and crisp, the pacing unhurried and considered. Metaphors are densely layered, and frequently tie Frédéric to the events of his past—shielding his mother from concern, gaining an employment card based on a fictive background that only serves to place his actual lived experience in sharp relief. We're reminded that, in fact, everyone comes from somewhere—even when that somewhere appears to be nowhere. The constant movement from place to place, from one country to another, slowly dissolves into a sort of background hum. As the novel progresses, one starts to intuit that it's perhaps not the experience of being an immigrant that counts but the need to be one.
How much of this is real is, of course, anyone’s guess. That is autofiction’s nature, and so many of the details here are purely incidental. But then again, that does feel like the point. Frédéric’s is an incidental life, one embarked upon almost by accident. What he succeeds in doing is making it purposeful. His life is essentially one long act of becoming in spite of everything, and it's a remarkably validating experience to be along for the ride.
Frédéric Courtois's debut novel THE WEIGHT OF PRESENCE is a touching, lucid account of one boy's search for definition.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader