• 1 Among the most influential, Janice Radway’s pioneering study of the Book of the Month club’s editor (...)
• 2 “The Middlebrow is difficult to define (…) because as a product of contested and precarious asserti (...)
• 3 Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow, 17
• 4 Aubry, Reading as Therapy, 10.

1Over the past twenty years, studies on Anglophone middlebrow fiction have flourished, challenging the previous neglect of middlebrow cultures by providing detailed accounts of twentieth century texts, their readerships and institutions.1 The majority of these studies attest to the instability of Middlebrow cultures and their classification.2 Despite this fluidity, several common aspects of Anglophone (British and American) Middlebrow fiction have been identified: it is feminized and class-conscious, its narratives encourage emotional engagement and favor mimetic styles. More recently, Beth Driscoll and Timothy Aubry have initiated important conversations about the contemporary (Anglophone) Middlebrow. Driscoll develops a taxonomy for what she calls the “new literary middlebrow”, traits which are shared and indeed inherited from the twentieth century: “middle-class, reverential towards high culture, and commercial; (…) feminized, emotional, recreational, mediated and earnest.”3 Through a different lens, Aubry’s Reading as Therapy focuses on the discourse and functions of Middlebrow fiction, arguing that although the Middlebrow produces diverse representations of the social world, it can above all be characterized by its distinctly therapeutic framework.4

• 5 Holmes and Looseley remark on France’s academic tradition of canon-making, and resistance to the cu (...)
• 6 Verstraeten and Van Hove, “ Imagining Adventure in Middlebrow Fiction”, 3-4.; Holmes, “The Mimetic (...)
• 7 This reading of popular narratives is initially proposed in “The Comfortable Reader” but not explic (...)

2In great contrast to the Anglophone context, Middlebrow fiction has been excluded from the French studies’ critical agenda, largely due to widespread academic disdain towards scholarship on popular fiction.5 This can also be attributed to the invisibility of the Middlebrow in France, neither an established nor recognizable category of fiction.6 As a consequence, there have been very few explicit accounts made of French Middlebrow fiction. Pioneering research in this area, Diana Holmes’s article “Mapping Modernity” identifies the aesthetics and function of the French Middlebrow during the Belle Époque, arguing that far from preserving the status quo, these narratives demonstrate a capacity to challenge traditional roles for women and promote new ways of being. Holmes is the first to discuss the existence of a contemporary French Middlebrow and to investigate its heritage. Extending a line of inquiry initiated several years earlier in “The Comfortable Reader”; her study proposes that popular novels, such as Anna Gavalda’s bestsellers, provide readers with pleasurable immersion in a realistic story world. Acknowledging and addressing readers’ anxieties about life in contemporary France (such as isolation and alienation), these narratives provide an optimistic vision and relief for the reader.7

• 8 Beth Driscoll identifies the roots of the term Middlebrow: “Phrenology, the linking of skull shape (...)
• 9 “in one sense middlebrow fiction is the ‘other’ of modernist or avant-garde novel” Humble, The Femi (...)
• 10 In a letter destined but not sent to the Statesman and published in Death of a Moth and Other Essay (...)
• 11 “the middlebrow was formed, rather, as a category, by processes of literary and cultural mixing whe (...)
• 12 Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow, 11.

5From its first designation as a category in English, the Middlebrow has been conceived of both relationally and hierarchically.8 With an inbuilt pejorative label indicating inferiority to the elite highbrow, it has long been considered the poor cousin to modernist literature.9 A rather extreme example of highbrow disdain is located in Virginia Woolf’s letter to The New Statesman where the writer zealously distances herself from the Middlebrow.10 For Woolf, Middlebrow cultural practices are detestable and threatening because of their hybridity, operating in the “betwixt and between” cultural space. Despite identifying Middlebrow habitus and ideology and defending it from dismissal, Janice Radway and Nicola Humble also understand the Middlebrow as a “hybrid”11 or “parasitic”12 form.

• 13 Pollentier, “ Configuring Middleness”, 38.
• 14 Bourdieu, La Distinction, 371.
• 15 Pollentier, “ Configuring Middleness”, 38.
• 16 ibid., 41.
• 17 Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow, 17.
• 18 ibid., 1.

6In the French context, the conceptualization of the Middlebrow is complicated by what Caroline Pollentier calls the “semantic fuzziness” of the term moyenne, interpretable as either “average” or “middle”.13 In Distinction, Bourdieu proposes that the cultural practices of the petit bourgeois, conflated with Middlebrow, exist purely through their relationship to legitimate culture.14 Critiquing Bourdieu’s treatment of the Middlebrow, Caroline Pollentier highlights that the ambiguity of moyen remains unresolved in his work15 and slippages between the two meanings result in an essentializing and negative understanding of la culture moyenne.16 Pollentier proposes a reinvestment in the Middlebrow as a culture outside hierarchy, emphasizing its moral and inclusive nature. Equally critical of Bourdieu’s relational framework, Beth Driscoll argues that his model is essentially binaristic, causing the Middlebrow to “disappear” in an ill-defined gap.17 This article responds to Driscoll’s invitation to produce an account of the Middlebrow that goes “beyond gatekeeping and culture wars”18. I propose to understand the Middlebrow through a parallel comparative analysis of the brows, rather than a relational framework. Such a method need not depend on a negative definition, or a judgment of the value of each brow. I wish to demonstrate that a parallel comparison of narrative themes and teleology can throw into relief the specificity of the Middlebrow, both what it is and what it is not.

• 19 “success with a wide popular audience also frequently depends on sensitivity to the moment, on topi (...)
• 20 “…authors of literary fiction can have best-sellers too, and conversely, not every work of popular (...)

8Bestseller lists can offer an insight into what the majority reads rather than an elite minority. Although impacted by international trends and market forces, they can also reflect the mood of the period in question19 and manifestations of the national imaginary. Such lists offer a corpus with a diversity of genres and brows, and contrary to common assumption, a bestseller is not always lowbrow.20 An analysis of bestselling fiction allows us to consider common themes across the brows and to identify their different articulations of contemporary issues.

• 21 Martigny, “Le débat autour de l’identité nationale dans la campagne présidentielle de 2007: quelle (...)
• 22 D.I.L.A. 2010. “Identité nationale: fin du débat ou simple pause?” Vie Publique, February 10. http: (...)
• 23 “Ce débat prend de l'ampleur. C'est très bien ainsi. Il va durer le temps qu'il faudra pour que les (...)
• 24 Gastaut, ““The Immigration Question”: Mainspring of Sarkozy's Presidency”, 338.

9The empirical research for this article focused on French novels that were bestsellers during the Sarkozy years (2007-2012), an interesting period for questions of the national image and belonging. It was during Sarkozy’s presidency that anxieties about national identity were brought explicitly and fervently into political and public discourse. Although these issues were present and indeed recurring in political discourse of the previous decades, they became central to the debate leading up to the 2007 presidential elections21 and were a dominant preoccupation of Sarkozy’s mandate. An official debate on “what it is to be French” was launched by Eric Besson in November 2009 and according to the minister’s outlined goals, aimed to heal France’s self-image: “faire émerger des actions permettant de conforter notre identité nationale, et de réaffirmer les valeurs républicaines et la fierté d’être Français".22 Continuing in this therapeutic paradigm, Henri Guaino, a spokesperson for Sarkozy, likened the debate to a form of “collective therapy” necessary for French citizens to feel better.23 The terms and form of the debate were criticized as rhetorical and the debate, and later the ministry itself, were dissolved. Despite the controversy surrounding the debate, there was considerable public engagement: the online forum received more than 58,000 responses and meetings were held in the Prefectures all over France.24 Three key elements of the socio-political discourse of this period are significant to my study: firstly, the connection made by the government between national identity and immigration; secondly, the evocation of France as a depressed patient needing therapy and thirdly, the anxieties evoked through the debate and in public forums. This article analyzes how these elements manifest in the bestsellers of the Sarkozy years. We will see that the narrative of the contemporary middlebrow novel is enmeshed in these questions, structured around the therapy of the alienated French protagonist recovering his/her self-image through a relationship with the foreigner.

• 25 Livres Hebdo uses sales data generated by Ipsos. The original annual lists include the top 50 books (...)
• 26 This figure also includes Franco-Belgian collaborations.

10This study was limited to the top 20 bestsellers over the 6-year period of Sarkozy’s presidency (2007-2012), consequently 120 titles in total. These titles were sourced from Livres Hebdo’s annual bestseller lists.25 Dominating these lists are international blockbusters such as Harry Potter, Twilight and Millenium; and polars by Harlan Coben, Fred Vargas and Mary Higgins-Clarke. Although these non-indigenous books rate highly, two thirds of the 120 titles were penned by French writers.26

• 27 I will discuss the differences between the terms “foreigner” and “immigrant” in the section focusin (...)
• 28 Following Timothy Aubry’s line of questioning in Reading as Therapy, 72-73: “what forms of dissatis (...)

11My analysis focused on novels which represent even in part, contemporary France - almost one third (37/120) of the positions. Significantly, the majority (30 out of 120 rankings) of these novels involve a relationship between a French protagonist and a foreigner.27 The frequency of this motif is striking and allows us to compare the varying image and function of the foreigner and Frenchness across the brows. Moreover, this research considers how the symptoms of national depression and “forms of dissatisfaction”28 are represented and managed in these narratives.

• 29 Holmes, “The Mimetic prejudice”, Imagining the Popular, 113.
• 30 We can also count Katherine Pancol’s trilogy in this category, although her French-foreigner relati (...)
• 31 Levy’s Mes amis mes amours was released in 2008, directed by Lorraine Levy; Musso’s Et après was re (...)
• 32 Holmes, “The Mimetic Prejudice” in Imagining the Popular, 86.

14The escapist narrative involves a romance between a French expatriate and an Anglophone (American or British) protagonist. Although some of the action takes place in France, the stories often jump back and forth between various countries and the relationship usually blossoms in the USA “echoing Harlequin’s desertion of national settings for a globalized North American ‘anywhere’…”29 The strongest examples of this category are bestsellers by Guillaume Musso and Marc Levy30, two French writers who rate highly in the annual lists, often with more than one title each year. These authors are well-known household names in France with strong marketing campaigns. Several of their bestsellers have been adapted into feature films.31 Diana Holmes calls these stories “cosmopolitan adventures” and identifies the familiar characterization and settings from American television and film.32

• 33 Whereas the nationality of secondary characters is explicit and stereotyped: a Japanese doctor (Je (...)

15In contrast to the Middlebrow, the nationalities of the principal characters in these escapist narratives are not emphasized and indeed, are sometimes obscured.33 For example, in Musso’s L’Appel de l’ange, Madeline, a florist in Paris, is actually British, whereas Jonathan, a chef who lives in the USA, is French. The contemporary world is represented as fast-paced and high-tech where characters have no permanent territory and belong rather to an international cosmopolitan class. Rather than emphasizing cultural differences, the narrative tends to accentuate the polarity of the couple’s personalities and a transnational identity. The French protagonists of these bestsellers are either working-class or petit bourgeois, and their British/American “soul mates” are explicitly represented as having working class origins. In the escapist narrative, the French protagonist is depressed or in crisis, because of heartbreak, unfulfilled dreams or an unresolved mystery: Jonathan in L’Appel de l’ange has experienced a fall from grace and a separation from his wife, Céline in Je reviens te chercher is dissatisfied with her conventional Parisian life, and Juliette of Sauve-moi is an aspiring actress who dreads the prospect of returning to a lacklustre life in the suburbs of Paris. France is portrayed as stifling and lacking in opportunities for a fulfilling existence. The success of the romance, the stories’ dénouement, is incorporated into the solving of a mystery, thus resulting in a double catharsis for the reader. Rather than a happy ending in France, the couple is united in an exotic ailleurs and the narrative does not return to the Republic. Musso and Levy adopt elements of a variety of genres including romance, thriller and polar. The philosophy of these narratives of escape is anchored in the spiritual world with frequent references to destiny, karma, soul mates, and an afterlife. Despite being embedded in recognizable geography, these narratives are thus fantastical. In conclusion, the escapist narrative does not attempt to provide a workable real-world solution to contemporary issues of the French reader. Instead, it describes a fast-paced alienating globalized world where true love gives life meaning and indeed bestows immortality. National identity is left behind and happiness is located beyond the Republic.

• 34 Ndiaye’s novel is a triptych and I must note here that only two of the three parts include a French (...)

16In this category a relationship with a foreigner fails to provide sustained recovery, épanouissement or sense of belonging for the French protagonist. Instead, it causes further destabilization and questioning of subjectivity. Two bestsellers can be attributed to this second narrative category: La carte et le territoire by Michel Houellebecq and Trois femmes puissantes by Marie Ndiaye.34 Both novels were awarded the Goncourt Prize, undoubtedly contributing to their bestseller status. Houellebecq, enfant terrible of the media, has been the subject of numerous academic studies with even a conference (Le Monde de Houellebecq, Edinburg 2005) devoted to his work. The reception of Ndiaye’s work establishes her as a highbrow writer, critically acclaimed both by the press and the academic world. Her first publishing house was Éditions Minuit and her play Papa doit manger was adopted by the Comédie Française.

• 35 Olga’s pet name for Jed. Houellebecq, La carte et le territoire, 225.
• 36 “en dehors de certaines zones très touristiques (..)les habitants de zones rurales sont en général (...)

17Curiously, the first part of Houellebecq’s La carte et le territoire resembles the Middlebrow narrative of recovery: isolated artist Jed begins a relationship with Russian businesswoman Olga who bolsters his self-image. The “petit francais”35 appears to thrive in this affair with the beautiful and glamorous Russian, his career rocketing. However, Houellebecq quickly diverges from the Middlebrow script: after Olga accepts a promotion in Russia, Jed rejects the possibility of happiness and lets the relationship dissolve. In the final chapters, Jed establishes a large estate in provincial France, but avoids interaction with the community. Houellebecq expresses tongue-in-cheek cynicism regarding life in rural France36 and his protagonist shows no desire to form a community, instead finding a sort of happiness in his isolation.

• 37 Ndiaye, Trois femmes puissantes 41-42
• 38 Holmes, “The mimetic prejudice” in Imagining the Popular, 87.
• 39 Leclair, “La communication triomphante ou la nécessité de redéfinir l'espace critique” in Les Temps (...)

18Two French-foreigner couples (Norah and Jakob, Rudy and Fanta) are represented in Trois femmes puissantes. In each case, the foreigner contributes to the French protagonist’s anxiety. Each couple is already formed at the beginning of the narrative, and thus the pathway to the relationship is in no way the focus or key event. Norah’s relationship with Jakob, who has immigrated from Hamburg to France, has brought her tension rather than relief, he is a burden and a source of mystery: “Seul un miracle la débarrasserait d’eux, les délivrerait, songeait-elle parfois, elle et Lucie de la cohabitation avec ce couple gracieux et subtilement malfaisant. Oh, c’était ainsi, elle était coincée.”37 In Ndiaye’s second story, the principal action takes place in France with references to an anterior past in an unnamed African country, resembling Senegal. Rudy’s marriage to Fanta is strained and alienating, with tension arising from Fanta’s infidelity but especially from Rudy’s spiraling lack of confidence and fear of not being able to please his family. The French protagonist appears to be at the height of isolation from friends and family, and failure at work. These novels do not attempt to comfort or ease anxieties but rather dwell in these uncomfortable states with no promise of relief. This confirms the understanding that critically acclaimed highbrow texts “have tended to…emphasize the unintelligibility and generally unsatisfactory nature of life.”38 This category portrays characters with complex identities and fraught belongings: Rudy has French nationality but his upbringing has been in Africa, Norah, a métisse from France is staying with her estranged father in Africa. Provincial France is a failed project; the life that Rudy dreamed of having with his wife and son is understood as illusory. Rather than feeling a sense of belonging, Rudy experiences discomfort and disgust. Furthermore, comfort appears to be located in Senegal, despite this being the site of childhood trauma. Although the teleology of the plot is a homecoming of sorts, a “contrepoint”39 to the anxiety and alienation that precedes it, the tension and issues of Rudy’s relationship with Fanta remain unresolved.

• 40 Aubry, Reading as Therapy, 50.

20Particularly significant in the socio-political context of the Sarkozy years, the Middlebrow narrative of recovery proposes a successful relationship between a French protagonist and a foreigner on French soil. Echoing Guiano and Besson’s goals for debate on national identity, the outcome of this narrative appears to be therapy for a depressed national identity. The plots are structured around a therapeutic cycle – from the description of symptoms of the depression, to the identification of the root causes and the recovery of the lost object, leading to the improved self-image and increased subjectivity of the French protagonist, as well as the elaboration of key strategies to “se sentir bien”. Akin to the American Middlebrow40, the narrative of recovery responds to contemporary anxieties about the atomization of society, a testament of longing for community and belonging in a landscape of fractured social relationships. However, specific to the French Middlebrow, this involves the reinsertion of the alienated protagonist into a community built on the values of the Republic.

• 41 Holmes, “The Comfortable Reader”, 294.
• 42 “The fragile possibility of uniting different cultures and identities within one indivisible Republ (...)

22The root causes of depression are identified as the loss of community, class tensions (blamed on the bourgeoisie), fractured family relationships and the threat of neo-liberalism on communal cultural practices. Importantly, the foreigner appears as a role model of Republican values - promoting freedom, equality, mutual respect and community. As Holmes has identified in Gavalda’s texts, these romances go beyond that of the traditional heterosexual couple to include nuclear and non-nuclear family members and friends.41 While non-nuclear families are also celebrated in escapist narrative, these are formed outside France. Rather than causing disgust, or permitting further isolation, as observed in the narrative of failure, provincial life in the Middlebrow offers a site of recovery for both the individual and the collective. The teleology of the plot invests in the imagining of an abstract “terroir” – an ideal “miniature”42 republic.

• 44 This corresponds to Humble’s claim that humour is characteristic of the Masculine Middlebrow. D’hok (...)
• 45 Philippe, Elisabeth, 2014.“Avec Charlotte, David Foenkinos s’échoue à s’acheter une crédibilité lit (...)
• 46 “J’ai simplement retranscrit ce que j'entendais dans mon oreille. Je n'ai pas une démarche très int (...)
• 47 Jourde and Naulleau, Le Jourde et Naulleau.

26Before exploring the therapeutic cycle of the French Middlebrow further, I will briefly introduce the three writers and their reception. David Foenkinos is the author of 16 novels to date and is especially known for his playful, comic style.44 Foenkinos has developed a strong public profile participating in frequent talks and book signings, and engaging with his readers in online forums and blogs. Although he has received numerous literary prizes including the Prix Francois-Mauriac and the Prix Roger-Nimier, there is very little academic scholarship on his work. In 2014, Charlotte was awarded the prestigious Prix Renaudot and the Goncourt des lycéens. Some have seen the change in style and subject matter as an attempt by Foenkinos to “buy credibility”45 in order to crossover to highbrow status. In contrast, Muriel Barbery is not nearly as prolific or as mediatized. While she participates in numerous interviews with magazines and radio, her profile is relatively discrete. Her success with L’Élégance du hérisson was a complete surprise to the media, as her first novel Une Gourmandise had received very little press. In 2015 Barbery’s much-anticipated third novel La vie des elfes was published, with poor reviews. Among these three authors, Anna Gavalda is probably the best known. Sales of La Consolante were no doubt boosted by the popularity of her earlier novel Ensemble c’est tout and the positive reception of the film adaptation. The media often emphasize Gavalda’s shyness, and she presents herself not as a writer but as someone who is attentive to real life.46 Her writing has been ridiculed as guimauve literature for the middle classes by satirists Éric Naulleau and Pierre Jourde, inspiring their damning pastiche in Le Jourde et Naulleau.47

• 48 Radway, A Feeling for Books, 252.

27While these three authors appear quite disparate they have some overlapping characteristics, including their age and education. Gavalda and Barbery were both high school teachers before their publishing success, significant in terms of the link Janice Radway has made between the Professional Managerial class and American Middlebrow culture.48 Equally, this role and sensibility are pertinent as it is the primary responsibility of a teacher is to transmit the values of the Republic.

• 49 “If novels in myriad ways construct the desires that they purport to satisfy, then they have also b (...)
• 50 Holmes, “the Comfortable Reader”, 294.

28Given the sheer volume of sales for these novels, it would seem that their assessment of “readers’ pre-existing needs”49 was indeed accurate and successful. Despite their diverse styles, the three texts follow a distinct narrative sequence and portray a similar landscape of contemporary anxieties. The first third of each text is devoted to building a portrait of the French protagonist’s depression and isolation, resulting in greater pleasure for the reader once their romantic interest is introduced to the narrative: “wounding instability is evoked in order to be resolved and cured (…) lack or loss is deliberately experienced for the pleasurable reassurance of recovery”.50 In each case, the French protagonist is in mourning, for a former partner, family and a home but also for a set of ideals for human relations: solidarity, mutual respect and open communication.

• 51 Barbery, Élégance du hérisson, 284.
• 52 Radway, A Feeling for Books, 4.

31There are several ways in which the foreigner facilitates the recovery of the French protagonist. Firstly, by recognizing their subjectivity and by providing affirmation, flattering their good taste and self-image. This is exemplified by the figure of Kakuro in Élégance, who bestows intellectual and aristocratic status on Renée by reassuring her of her brilliance and superior tastes: “Des prétentions? Mais vous n’avez pas de prétentions, vous avez des goûts, des lumières, des qualités!”51 Kakuro’s attentions transform Renée into a lady, finally visible to the world. Janice Radway sees such desire for recognition and affirmation as core to middlebrow culture, “aimed at people like me who wanted desperately to present themselves as educated, sophisticated, and aesthetically articulate.”⁵² Moreover, by identifying the protagonist with an intellectual class, the French Middlebrow sidesteps the inherent contradiction in desiring social ascension while holding on to ideals of equality.

• 53 The banding together of misfits is identified as a typical Middlebrow trope. Aubry, Reading as Ther (...)
• 54 Pollentier, “Configuring Middleness”, 46.
• 55 According to Périco Légasse, the notion of terroir goes beyond a geographical conceptualization, an (...)

35The final stage of the Middlebrow’s cycle of therapy entails the reinsertion of the French protagonist in a community and the articulation of strategies for sustained individual and collective well-being. The community is made up of a group of misfits,53 who come together to form a non-nuclear family governed by respect for individual difference. The narrative of recovery could thus be considered a national representation of J.B. Priestley’s broadbrow, which transforms the Middlebrow into a moral space of “inclusivity and friendship.”54 The forged community in Élégance is more symbolic and temporary, but provides Renée with the family, happiness and recognition she has been yearning for. In La Consolante and La Délicatesse, the recovery involves leaving Paris for the terroir⁵⁵, a site in an abstract rural France where the community is protected from the negative impact of modernity and the city, but not necessarily cut off from it. The Middlebrow does not produce a utopic or bucolic vision but rather, one that promotes a balance between global citizenship and community belonging. The most developed model of the middlebrow community is located in Gavalda’s Consolante, where Kate has reinvigorated a site significant to France’s national history and formed a community open to society’s most vulnerable. Kate renews this community’s connection to the land, the patrimoine of the republic and ensures it is governed by values resembling those of the Republic. The French protagonist is needed to bolster this community, conferring on it his legitimacy and Cartesian thinking. Gavalda emphasizes the infinitely inclusive nature of this community, capable of continuing expansion. The Middlebrow novel thus imagines a home in the nation for its once alienated protagonist and other wounded individuals who are in need of belonging, freedom and solidarity.