Virginie Grimaldi, Mélissa Da Costa, Agnès Ledig, Aurélie Valognes, a golden square! Who publishes a novel a year, sells millions of copies, delights publishers, delights fans on social networks and… attracts very little attention from the media, and even less from literary juries. A little condescending, the small Germanopratin milieu has definitely put their stories back in the register of feel good books, these books that do good, mainly intended for women. It is true that many of them hurry during the signing sessions, in order to collect a warm word from their “heroine”.
For Béatrice Duval, the boss of the Pocket Book, the small-format publisher (with formidable marketing) of the four best-selling women, heiresses of Françoise Bourdin and Katherine Pancol, “they reap the fruit of their authenticity and their sincerity. , which the reader feels very well”. Empathy, resilience, solidarity… are the key words of their novels, whose protagonists, no offense to their critics, are not all saints, but who, it is true, do not shine by the singularity of their style – that we would qualify as applied, or worse, when it wants to be precious, convoluted. But let’s judge on parts. Focus on the new novels of the magic square.
Agnès Ledig, the empathetic
Agnès Ledig is conscientious. Too much perhaps. At the very end of his new novel (the tenth), A makeshift shelter, the Alsatian novelist gives thanks, “American style”, to the readings, testimonies, advice, confidences… which allowed her to write her story. So, we take her word for it: none of the details on permaculture, wild plants, equine emotions, or even the profession of criminal identification technician can be wrong. But wouldn’t the novel have been more fluid without some of the descriptions of this dense story, whose action takes place in the exploitation of Adrien and Capucine, a refuge lost in the Vosges forest which welcomes boarders sent by State services? In this case, Rémy, 27 years old, on parole, Clémence, 18 years old, anorexic and Karine, 45 years old, professor of history-geography run down by her headmaster and… the divine bottle; or three characters, as the 50-year-old ex-midwife likes them.
Of Mary from abovehis first novel, in 2011, at The Tiny Queen, in 2021, Agnès Ledig will indeed have never ceased to reach out to those who are injured in life in order to allow them to make peace with their past. The classic plot, and successful, of this literature from which good feelings always emerge victorious. That said, we like its protagonists, who will gradually tame each other, help each other and find meaning in contact with nature and the rhythm of working the land. Notwithstanding the falls of the chapters, nicely ridiculous, supposed to revive the – false – suspense and (or) the mystery (one would say the cliffhangers if we were in), we become attached to the “big brother” Rémy, whose crime seems so understandable to us, to Clémence, who has lost his mother or even to the dynamic Karine. We just wish they healed faster.
A makeshift shelter, by Agnes Ledig. Albin Michel, 368 pages, €21.90.
Mélissa Da Costa, the adventurer
She is the youngest of the group, arriving like a rocket in the magic tribe of bestsellers. At 32, this former communications officer in the energy sector has smashed many records since the publication of her first novel. All the blue of the sky (Carnets Nord) in 2019 (first published on the self-publishing platform monbestseller.com), until reach the third step of the biggest sellers in France in 2022 (behind Guillaume Musso and Joël Dicker) with nearly 850,000 copies, all formats combined. Pimped out by Albin Michel, a house that knows how to turn into a steamroller when necessary, she has already published her sixth novel in early March. His trademark ? Travel, sources of escape, reconstruction and resilience. With The women of the end of the world, it is in the antipodes, in a campsite in South New Zealand, that his young heroine arrives like woofer to try to forget. Mélissa Da Costa makes no secret of it: Flore is a bad wife, shameless and unpredictable, who pushed her nice husband to suicide (failed). For what ? We will know it bit by bit during this river novel (nearly 400 dense pages), which lets us glimpse an intrusive mother-in-law and a motherhood that does not come.
For now, three mute women meet. The frail Flore, then, bewildered and ravaged by guilt, Autumn and her daughter Milly, the hard-working owners of the campsite whipped by the wind – the husband is dead, swept away by a wave. Obviously, relations between the Frenchwoman, a hard worker, and the two New Zealanders will soften over time… so much so that Flore and Milly will begin a love story, described with lovely sensitivity by the novelist ( and much more believable than Parisian flashbacks featuring a demonic Flora). In the end, we would gladly have let ourselves be carried away by this story from the end of the world if there hadn’t been 100 pages too many. Even if it means looking like an awful urban scene, we would have cheerfully slashed in the long scenes on the wonderful fauna of the Catlins (sheep, sea lions, sea lions, penguins, dolphins, whales) and the no less wonderful Maori legends.
Women from around the world, by Melissa Da Costa. Albin Michel, 384 pages, €21.90.
Virginie Grimaldi, the joker
Thunderbolt in December 2022. According to a consultation conducted by France Télévisions, the favorite book of the French is none other thanIt’s high time to rekindle the stars (Fayard, 2018), Virginie Grimaldi’s fourth novel, ahead of Harry Potter, The little Prince, Wretched… Class feel good bookthis road-trip featuring a mother and her two daughters even won ahead of The Foam of the Days, The Stranger or Pride and Prejudice. Nothing that can upset this woman from the South West, who knows how to keep a cool head and humility. The 45-year-old former humor blogger (Femme Sweet Femme), published since 2015 (The First Day of the rest of my life, City Editions)moreover does not take pleasure in the genre feel good whose superficiality and mistakes she recognizes if necessary and from which she tries to distance herself by tackling darker themes, such as those octogenarians fighting to defend their neighborhood (When our memories come to dance, 2019) or this intergenerational trio of battered flatmates (We will have this2022).
Like a metronome, here she is again with A beautiful life, a ninth novel, conceived with two voices: that of Emma, born in 1980, and that of her five-year-old daughter, Agathe. The book, printed in 180,000 copies (!), opens with their reunion, in August 2019, after a few years of polite silence, in the house on the Basque coast of their dear grandmother, who died recently. They tell, each in turn, this week of reconciliation (?), all intertwined with memories shelled since their early childhood. Emma, a school teacher, arrives from Strasbourg, where she lives with husband and children, Agathe, she is an educator in a local Ehpad. Emma is responsible, pragmatic, with a psychorigid tendency, Agathe is more lively, even extravagant. Between baths in the Atlantic, surfing sessions and two trips to La Rhune, the past comes flooding in: the parents’ divorce, the father’s death, the mother’s beatings, depressive and alcoholic, Emma’s constant attention towards Agathe, the love affairs… Their visions often diverge, the fact remains that over the week, the ties between the two sisters, from one dramatic confidence to the next, continue to tighten. It is this path that Virginie Grimaldi approaches here with a seriousness tinged with humor. Nothing revolutionary, after all, but a leg, certainly.
A beautiful life, by Virginie Grimaldi. Flammarion, 384 pages, €20.90.
Aurélie Valognes, the rebel
Loneliness of the elderly, school failure, women’s rights, ecology, transmission… Certainly, Aurélie Valognes favors societal themes, and this is successful for her. Of Granny in the nettles (self-published in 2014, Michel Lafon in 2015, Le Livre de poche in 2016) at The Ritournelle (Fayard, 2022), via Born under a beautiful starin 2020, the former marketing director of an American company is accumulating successes, and not the least (her Even…sold over a million copies). With Flight, her ninth novel, the graduate of Sup de co Reims, without changing register, certainly publishes her most personal and delicate work, the story in two voices of a mother and a daughter, who stand out in the as the younger one progresses socially. A story “à la Annie Ernaux” (minus the style), to which Aurélie Valognes explicitly refers, from a modest family (car painter father, mother employed in a kindergarten), and which was inspired by her, writes- she, through Adrien Naselli’s book on transclasses, And your parents, what do they do? (JC Lattès, 2021), in which she participated.
In the novel, they are called Gabrielle and Lili. Gabrielle, a child of indebted, acculturated and alcoholic parents, works hard as a carer for “little old people” to raise, alone, her daughter, to whom she devotes herself exclusively. Lili, a brilliant student, takes refuge in the books of the municipal library in her suburbs. They are in symbiosis, until the 10 years of Lili whose emancipation and studies begin to create tensions. Lili rebels, refuses to bow down like her mother, fights against social fatalism, joins a preparation course with daddy’s boys, transforms her anger into rage (“A brave heart nothing is impossible”), succeeds in competitions, marries a “bourgeois”, while remaining an eternal “exiled”… But if their trajectories diverge, there will never be a break. What can I say? That this is a beautiful story of filial love, which however errs in the often facile expressions and inappropriate tone used by Gabrielle.While Lili is ashamed of her mother’s language, Agnès Ledig makes her speak like a disciple of Bourdieu.Oops.
Flight, by Aurélie Valognes. Fayard, 360 pages, €20.90.