The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrére
Christopher Paddock

Emmanuel Carrère. Class Trip. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Metropolitan, 1997. 162 pp. $19.95.

Carrère’s latest novel has been a popular success, both in the States and abroad (winner of the Prix Femina; rights sold in fourteen countries). And for good reason, perhaps. Though Class Trip echoes same understated, Kafkaesque anxiety that made his The Mustache popular in literary circles, Carrère distances the reader from the brutal consequences of a relentless self-conscious. We come to know the horror of this novel gradually; it floats underneath the text as Carrère subtly implies the gravity of what is known without revealing its face. Class Trip is terrifying not because what is suspected is acknowledged via a dramatic climax, but because suspicion becomes steadily actualized over the course of reading it.
Nicholas, a ten-year-old boy, is dropped off by his father at a skiing school to join his classmates. He is an introverted, small kid, a bedwetter who never stays over at anyone else’s house. His father, a prosthetic limb salesman, is the harbinger of Nicholas’s ills; he has left with Nicholas’s suitcase in the trunk of the car after insisting upon driving him three hours to the school. Nicholas’s pensive nature and social anxiousness appear to be informed by a volatile home life; the reader is left with as vague but eery a sense of the forces that run his family as Nicholas. What is apparent is the transcendence of the father’s paranoia into Nicholas’s consciousness. Nicholas’s gruesome daydreams constantly seek redemption for his father’s tales of children who are kidnapped by organ hunters.
Because Carrère paces this book slowly, its horrible truths are left within the text—nothing is ever directly conveyed. A dark cloud subtly envelopes the reader as Carrère contextualizes Nicholas’s unsettling anxieties. There is no startling conclusion, nor are there any banal moral epiphanies at the novel’s end. Instead, the reader is left with the terrible realities of what has not been said. A finely crafted achievement. [Christopher Paddock]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrére Christopher Paddock Emmanuel Carrère. Class Trip. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Metropolitan, 1997. 162 pp. $19.95. Carrère’s latest novel has been a popular success, both in the States and abroad (winner of the Prix Femina; rights sold in fourteen countries). And for good reason, perhaps. Though Class Trip echoes same understated, Kafkaesque anxiety that made his The Mustache popular in literary circles, Carrère distances the reader from the brutal consequences of a relentless self-conscious. We come to know the horror of this novel gradually; it floats underneath the text as Carrère subtly implies the gravity of what is known without revealing its face. Class Trip is terrifying not because what is suspected is acknowledged via a dramatic climax, but because suspicion becomes steadily actualized over the course of reading it. Nicholas, a ten-year-old boy, is dropped off by his father at a skiing school to join his classmates. He is an introverted, small kid, a bedwetter who never stays over at anyone else’s house. His father, a prosthetic limb salesman, is the harbinger of Nicholas’s ills; he has left with Nicholas’s suitcase in the trunk of the car after insisting upon driving him three hours to the school. Nicholas’s pensive nature and social anxiousness appear to be informed by a volatile home life; the reader is left with as vague but eery a sense of the forces that run his family as Nicholas. What is apparent is the transcendence of the father’s paranoia into Nicholas’s consciousness. Nicholas’s gruesome daydreams constantly seek redemption for his father’s tales of children who are kidnapped by organ hunters. Because Carrère paces this book slowly, its horrible truths are left within the text—nothing is ever directly conveyed. A dark cloud subtly envelopes the reader as Carrère contextualizes Nicholas’s unsettling anxieties. There is no startling conclusion, nor are there any banal moral epiphanies at the novel’s end. Instead, the reader is left with the terrible realities of what has not been said. A finely crafted achievement. [Christopher Paddock]

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