Epistolary novels, with narratives unfolding through letters and diary entries, first became a major mode of fiction in 18th-century France.
Letter-writing had become a popular practice then, one representing both an act of intimacy and private confidence between people. It also sometimes served as a kind of public performance of intellectual prowess. There was always the risk some felt – imagined and real – that a letter could be opened, and therefore its contents available for public scrutiny and judgment.
Novels in this tradition are replete with these tensions, leveraging the privacies that correspondence afford along with the transgressive pleasure found in reading another’s private thoughts. Dangerous Liaisons, released in 1782, proved one popular account in the genre, chronicling how lust and desire entrap gullible aristocrats in a cruel love game. Elsewhere, Julie, or the New Heloise, by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, followed a dalliance between a tutor and pupil to advance the idea that society corrupts individuals.
Relations of power between people are what similarly shape Gavin McCrea’s inventive new epistolary effort, Rousseau’s Lost Children. The Dublin-born novelist, whose 2022 memoir Cells was a raw self-portrait confronting shame and painful familial bonds, returns with a novel pairing the teachings of Rousseau with an intimate, often devastating, story of a teacher and student. Emails, notes to self, letters and book excerpts are stitched together to form a through-line between Rousseau’s ideas on personal liberty and morality alongside this trenchant account of human bonds.
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Rousseau’s Lost Children follows Gavin, an Irish academic returning to Paris some 20 years after first visiting as a young student. On the surface, his return is only motivated by attempts to finish his eponymous monograph on Rousseau. But the novel then splices letters Gavin sends to Rousseau (dated 1777) to join him on his well-known walks through the streets of Paris. After finally giving in to Gavin’s requests, Rousseau and Gavin take sojourns that grapple with subjects such as gratitude, sorrow and love. It becomes apparent that Gavin is less using these figurative walks to understand the philosopher’s life story than as an avenue to help deal with dormant past trauma.
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This is because Rousseau is the man who connects Gavin to Cyprien, a professor at the Sorbonne who once provided companionship and deep emotional and financial support to the Irish student. That is, we learn, until both men coveted what they couldn’t have. Encounters with Rousseau begin in desperation – “You must take pity on me. Agree to see me, no matter how,” Gavin says – before Gavin exposes his lingering grief and self-hatred borne from meeting the Rousseau academic.
Across a series of disclosures both to Rousseau and his boyfriend Pedro back home, Gavin reveals a past overwrought with great suffering and paternal longing. A broken home, failed academic career, tortured relationship with father-figure Cyprien, and much unrealised, unreciprocated love. His own body is now marked with painful scars from the trauma, while his psyche is still burdened by the emotional cruelty inflicted by this former friend.
Rousseau’s Lost Children, expansive and philosophical all at once, proves a shattering study of power perverted by a mentor, and the moral lessons left in the aftermath
Rousseau’s Lost Children excels at taking emotional subjects, from anger to guilt, maps each against Rousseau’s philosophies, and works to challenge our usual attitudes to them. One example is pity, examined against the moment when far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in the 2002 French election. In response to the outcome, Cyprien reports only feeling pity for the leader: “Pity, unlike outrage, arrived in your world cleansed of any duty to justify itself,” Gavin observes. Disgust, however, is what Gavin thinks should have been the response to the racist, reactionary leader. Rousseau, meanwhile, would argue that pity here simply hides an emotional truth: “You use the mask of pity to conceal the real nature of your feelings.”
Amid these philosophical interludes, Gavin must face a pressing moral obligation that has long haunted him: admitting to police that he lied for Cyprien and helped cover up sexual harassment the academic inflicted on former students. This #MeToo reckoning also compels Gavin to confront the abusive acts the professor forced him to perform. Rousseau’s teachings cast a shadow over these charged events, stressing the way the French thinker enriched Gavin’s inner life, but also underscoring the great harm the Rousseau expert Cyprien wrought in educating Gavin.
[ ‘Hey, faggot!’: Gavin McCrea on a lifetime of homophobic abuse and violenceOpens in new window ]
Rousseau’s Lost Children, expansive and philosophical all at once, proves a shattering study of power perverted by a mentor, and the moral lessons left in the aftermath. If McCrea enlivens Rousseau’s teachings – such as that people are often corrupted by society, and forgo their essential goodness – he does so with a deft obliqueness. His letters act as a kind of exegesis for present-day events, bringing into sharp focus the moral lessons of this great thinker and forcing us to ask questions about personal liberty and love.
To know someone – both another and oneself – proves one key lesson. As his boyfriend Pedro writes to Gavin, “Total clarity in a person is false to me.” Rousseau’s Lost Children packs a heavy emotional punch, producing a deeply affecting account of power and connection and its ability to entrap us, even in love.
Nathan Smith is a writer on books and culture
