lullaby by leila slimani

times literary supplement 9 february 2018

Leila Slimani’s second novel won the Prix Goncourt and became the most read book in France in 2016. Now translated by Sam Taylor, it is being marketed as this year’s Gone Girl. Myriam and Paul are blissfully happy after the birth of their first child, but shortly afterwards “the clocklike perfection of the family mechanism jammed”. When Myriam, who is of North African descent, visits a childcare agency, she is assumed to be a prospective employee. She hires a white nanny; this is partly because Myriam “has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity”, and partly because the nanny in question, Louise – an ageless, doll-like widow – is so oddly beguiling. This Mary Poppins-like figure has a transformative effect not just on Mila and Adam, the couple’s two young children, but on the whole household. Soon, she has “pushed back the walls. She has made the cupboards deeper, the drawers wider. She has let the sun in”.

We know from the opening (“The baby is dead”) how this will end, and there is never any question that Louise is the culprit; it is Slimani’s task to convince us that this is possible. We observe the lonely nanny embedding herself ever deeper in the family, spending the last of her money on taking the children out to dinner so that the couple can (she hopes) conceive another child that will in turn increase their dependency on her. In her obsession with another woman’s family, Louise recalls Nora, the heroine of Claire Messud’s brilliant novel The Woman Upstairs (TLS, May 31, 2013). In Lullaby it is the mother, rather than the outsider, who pays a terrible price for this entanglement.

Slimani raises troubling questions about how Myriam and Paul’s behaviour has invited this cruellest of actions. We are shown the couple’s detachment from Louise’s problems. On a family holiday, when it becomes apparent that she cannot swim, Paul “blames Louise for having brought her poverty, her frailties all the way here. For having poisoned their day with her martyr’s face”. The couple are insensitive, and then lax, when it transpires that Louise has not been paying income tax. Ultimately, they are utterly unable to understand the position of this woman who has never had her own bedroom, or had a meal cooked for her.

Louise’s pain feels recognizable, but we only witness her obliquely. It is fitting, of course, that this woman who lacks agency is also denied articulacy, but as readers we do miss this insight into her psyche. Slimani’s taut prose also occasionally becomes hysterical (Myriam experiences the memory of a humiliation like having her “guts slashed open”). Lullaby is, however, consistently spellbinding: a supremely confident and provocative novel that deserves a similar success to Gillian Flynn’s bestseller.

This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement