A father’s nightmare: What You Need From the Night, by Laurent Petitmangin, reviewed

The unnamed narrator of Laurent Petitmangin’s prizewinning first novel, What You Need From the Night, a middle-aged railway engineer and lifelong socialist, is faced with his worst nightmare when his 24-year-old son Frédéric, known as Fus, joins a violent far-right group.

The narrator lives with his younger son Gillou and Fus in a village in eastern France, near the Luxembourg border. It’s an insular part of the country, suspicious of the capital and devoid of employment prospects or cultural resources. The sole diversions appear to be football and alcohol.

Petitmangin depicts a predominantly male world, accentuated in the narrator’s case by the death of his wife after her three-year battle with cancer. This is described with an admirable lack of sentimentality, as both Fus and his father acknowledge how boring their regular visits to the hospice had been. The wife herself, when told that she was fighting for her children, had replied: ‘I’m the one I’m doing it for.’