If he was once ashamed of his background, he is now ashamed about what he did to escape that background. An epigraph to Change could be: wherever you go, there you are.

Louis certainly goes places. If he sometimes seems like a provincial hero of a classic French novel, out to conquer the capital, he has also by now become like Zola’s Nana. In Paris he hooks up with men on the internet who pay him for sex; on a higher scale of payment, wealthy, cultivated men take him to Bayreuth. Soon enough he is socialising with princesses, and the descendants of great industrialist families. Unlike his literary forebears, this adventurer, however, is not crushed by society, or Society. Louis’s comeuppance is self-alienation.

He learns that the rich are awful; not only do they have Picassos on the wall, they have sofas covered in polar bear fur, and are rude to the help. (Afterwards he tells Eribon an ingratiating, self-flattering story about coming to the defence of that insulted employee; speaking on the page to Eribon, self-abasingly, he admits he made it up and like any old coward actually kept silent.)

Nor does his subsequent literary celebrity seem any more satisfying: “At first this life awed me, and then it left me jaded and disgusted.” Of course there is no going back. “I’m not nostalgic about poverty, but about the possibility of the present. Or rather: I hated my childhood and I miss my childhood.”

Yet Louis has found the way to try to resolve these conflicts. Like Annie Ernaux, an acknowledged influence, who called her Nobel lecture I Will Write To Avenge My People, he has used his writing as an intervention to confront the issue of class, the abiding embarrassment of the contemporary left.