{"id":327923,"date":"2026-03-04T06:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T06:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/327923\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T06:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T06:00:16","slug":"gavin-mccrea-on-walking-in-paris-with-rousseau-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/327923\/","title":{"rendered":"Gavin McCrea on walking in Paris with Rousseau \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLondon<\/a> was never even on my radar,\u201d Gavin McCrea tells me on Zoom. \u201cYou know, it was always Paris<\/a>. I was going to live in Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n

This desire provided the setting of his new epistolary novel<\/a> Rousseau\u2019s Lost Children, where a middle-aged Irish academic named Gavin Mulvany writes in 2022-23 to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau who responds in 1777-78. Gavin winds up accompanying Rousseau on his Paris walks. With maps of the routes they take and atmospheric descriptions of the various arrondissements, the book provides full immersion for anyone who has yet to take the Paris plunge.<\/p>\n

McCrea himself is one such person. \u201cOn both of the occasions that I tried to move to Paris, I totally failed,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was too much for me. I couldn\u2019t find a place. One of these times was sort of related to a relationship that didn\u2019t work out \u2026 I\u2019ve lived in various places, and I\u2019ve returned to Paris on visits, and there\u2019s always been: why haven\u2019t I ever made it here? Why haven\u2019t I ever been here for a long period of time? It just never happened. So that\u2019s the relationship I have with Paris, one of longing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not least among the factors hindering him was the expense. Berlin offered more realistic rent on a writer\u2019s income. \u201cBerlin was just so much more relaxed, and it worked out and things went my way.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCrea and I were both living there when we first met two years ago at an Irish Embassy literary event. I mentioned I was reading Annie Ernaux and he showed me a book of hers he was carrying in his pocket. We\u2019ve been friends ever since. Only later did I realise I\u2019d already read McCrea\u2019s first novel, Mrs Engels<\/a>, in 2016; completely uninvolved in the literary world at the time, I\u2019d admired it without looking up the author.<\/p>\n

Despite McCrea\u2019s Berliner credentials, it\u2019s not a coincidence that he set Rousseau\u2019s Lost Children in Paris, the city that remained out of reach. \u201cIf I don\u2019t have a sort of desire, a feeling of desire when I\u2019m writing, something is missing \u2026 And I\u2019m not necessarily talking about sexual desire. I\u2019m just talking about longing for a world that I won\u2019t experience, probably.\u201d<\/p>\n

Central to the book is Cyprien Abreo, a French academic who becomes the protagonist\u2019s mentor before embroiling him in a sexual misconduct scandal. Abreo is one of a male triad structuring Gavin\u2019s thoughts. Pedro, his partner back in Ireland, is a stable love interest wanting children (Gavin doesn\u2019t, at least not now). Rousseau is a purely platonic companion whose initial surly resistance to Gavin\u2019s intellectual courtship \u2013 \u201cEven Voltaire would struggle to mangle the language so successfully\u201d \u2013 gradually gives way to genuine engagement. The married and apparently heterosexual Abreo rests between the two positions in a non-sexual relationship charged with tension. This ambiguity serves Abreo, not Gavin, but the latter gets enough out of it to have great trouble leaving.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0After all these years in Berlin, I\u2019m back in Dublin as a tourist in my hometownOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a sense it wounds [Gavin] deeply,\u201d McCrea says. \u201cAnd yet, when I was writing it, I was thinking, God, I would have loved to have had a relationship like this at his age \u2026 And of course, it\u2019s archaic, it\u2019s a kind of trope, it\u2019s a cliche. And yet, I did [fantasise about it] as a young man. There\u2019s no doubt about it. I was never brave enough to really pursue it or to look for it. But I did imagine a sort of older Prince Charming coming into my life and ruining it.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the powerful older man is something of an archetype, rarer is the seriousness and nuance with which McCrea examines male friendship. \u201cI could not reconcile this inattentive conduct with the signs of intimacy that you had given me on our previous meetings,\u201d rebukes Rousseau when Gavin doesn\u2019t write for months. \u201cI wanted to write to you to complain; I did not have the strength to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jean-JacquesJean-Jacques Rousseau. Engraving photograph: Time Life Pictures\/Mansell\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

I remark that we often see men in literature requiring an external goal to spend time together platonically: a shared quest, a mystery to solve, an earl\u2019s prize canary going missing if we\u2019re in PG Wodehouse. McCrea\u2019s depiction of deep male friendship as an end in itself reflects what he\u2019s encountered in life. \u201cI do have experience of relationships, of friendships with straight men \u2026 And they were always quite intense \u2026 And so I think this novel was an attempt to kind of explain that.\u201d <\/p>\n

McCrea allows that the seeming profundity of these connections might come more from psychological mystery than from substance. \u201cIf someone\u2019s quiet and not saying anything or not communicating with you in a way that you understand, you begin to believe that actually there\u2019s something deep there \u2026 There may be nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCrea was not supposed to write this book. He had accepted a decent advance \u2013 \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say, globally speaking, an enormous advance, but certainly the biggest advance that I\u2019ve ever earned\u201d \u2013 to write an academic text on Rousseau. One day, after a year of research, he sat down at his desk and the unthinkable happened. \u201cI wrote in the voice of Rousseau, that first letter \u2026 And I said, oh s**t, I\u2019m writing a novel. Oh s**t, I\u2019m writing an epistolary novel. And oh s**t, I\u2019m breaking my contract.\u201d<\/p>\n

He worked on the novel for almost a year before showing it to his agent. \u201cAnd [she] said, okay, well, you\u2019re breaking your contract, which you already know, but this is good. So just keep going and we\u2019ll see what we can do. So that was sort of miraculous of her to say that, because it could have gone another way.\u201d The strictly nonfiction academic publisher wasn\u2019t able to accept the novel, but the agent sold it quickly to John Murray.<\/p>\n

Rousseau\u2019s Lost Children is McCrea\u2019s fourth book, succeeding two historical novels and a memoir. He sees this new novel \u2013 experimental, semi-historical, pseudo-autobiographical \u2013 as a natural progression in his writing practice. \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t written those books before, there\u2019s no way it could have come out in this way,\u201d McCrea says. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018This book is a love letter to my mother, which doesn\u2019t mean it would be easy for her to read\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t have had the confidence to do it. I wouldn\u2019t have had the need to experiment with form a little bit more. I wouldn\u2019t have had the need to experiment with what historical fiction means \u2026 and I wouldn\u2019t have had the confidence to play around with the self in the way that I do in this book if I hadn\u2019t written a highly intimate memoir.\u201d<\/p>\n

The premise of the novel \u2013 two people living in different centuries go on walks together \u2013 is one the characters sportingly accept as possible, just as no one in Kafka\u2019s Metamorphosis wonders how exactly a person wakes up an insect. \u201cBut I did want the question to be the extent to which Rousseau is a figment of Gavin\u2019s imagination \u2026 To what extent is Gavin writing Rousseau? To what extent is Rousseau writing Gavin? All of that kind of stuff. I wanted to play around with that a little bit. And it was really fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re treated a certain way by a society \u2026 you become questioning very quickly, very early on. You don\u2019t trust what people are saying on the surface<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Gavin McCrea<\/p>\n

The choice to give Gavin the writer\u2019s name raised the stakes of grappling with moral complexity; neither author nor reader is cushioned by comfortable distance from reality. \u201cGavin is a cruel person in the book, on occasion,\u201d McCrea says. \u201cHe does bad things. He commits a crime, he manipulates to get what he wants, and so on. Let\u2019s say he\u2019s very, very flawed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s epistolary form playfully mirrors 21st-century communication, where mediation through text and image \u2013 as once happened through letters \u2013 makes us faster to judge online than we would be in person. \u201cI wanted [Gavin] to be the one on the wrong side, let\u2019s put it like that. I don\u2019t necessarily want people to believe that I\u2019m on the wrong side, but I want people to believe that I could be or could have been \u2026 I\u2019m not here to justify anything or anyone. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, if someone does something wrong, they\u2019ve done something wrong. I\u2019m not here to upend that or to say someone shouldn\u2019t go to jail. What I merely am showing is that there\u2019s a story behind every deed. Every dark deed. And there are consequences. You know, there are always consequences to such actions.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCrea\u2019s suspicion of snap judgments and easy answers comes partly from his experience as a gay man. \u201cWhen you\u2019re treated a certain way by a society, and in a very generalised way, not just one person in your classroom \u2026 you become questioning very quickly, very early on. You don\u2019t trust what people are saying on the surface. You\u2019re delving in, you\u2019re looking behind. What do these people really mean? How they\u2019re behaving doesn\u2019t make sense to me. How can I make sense of this?\u201d<\/p>\n

The character Gavin is perplexed by human irrationality, sometimes hilariously so; I laughed uncontrollably at his impatient assertion that \u201cAll Oedipus has to do is make two unbreakable rules for himself: never to kill an older man, and never to marry an older woman\u201d. But McCrea himself tries to keep his fiction a space of curiosity, not sanctimony. \u201cIt\u2019s such a precarious position to be the person pointing the finger \u2026 As soon as you point the finger, which I do on a daily basis regularly, I can see what shaky ground I\u2019m on. And that\u2019s really interesting to me. And I think that\u2019s interesting to every fiction writer, frankly, to see how the ego judges \u2026 Because, you know, it can so easily all fall apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it does, we are not all so lucky as to have Rousseau guiding us. All the more reason to bathe in these letters and emerge understanding a bit more about human darkness.<\/p>\n

Rousseau\u2019s Lost Children is published by John Murray tomorrow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cLondon was never even on my radar,\u201d Gavin McCrea tells me on Zoom. \u201cYou know, it was always…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[27235,93,61,60,1838],"class_list":["post-327923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-berlin","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-paris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}