This Strange Eventful History

Gaston’s wife and the mother of their children, including François, Lucienne isn’t as thoroughly developed as the novel’s other characters, yet she’s an important figure. Like the other Cassars, she’s devoted to her family. She takes seriously the roles of wife and mother and even believes that “[p]art of a wife’s job was to be desirable to her husband” (98). She embodies a set of ideals and gender roles that typify her generation and provides a point of contrast to more modern characters like Barbara and Chloe.

Lucienne is also deeply religious. A devout Catholic, she remains dedicated to the Church throughout her life. Catholicism was central to the cultural identity of many pieds-noirs, and in this regard she represents the experience of the French Algerian community of which Claire Messud’s family was a part. She deeply connects to the idea of French Algerian identity but also feels a distinct sense, at least in part, of being culturally French. She participates in French culture largely through her religion and teaches her children about their French heritage through raising them within the Catholic faith. That only one of her children becomes as devout as she is reflects the difficulty of maintaining cultural ties to France in exile.

At the beginning of the novel, François is a nine-year-old pied-noir (French Algerian) boy who has spent the entirety of his life abroad. His father is the naval attaché at the French consulate in Salonica, Greece. The novel initially introduces François through the complex framework of cultural identity. He knows he’s French but also French Algerian. Even more complex is that because of his father’s career, he has spent his youth in Lebanon and Greece. He later feels like an outsider in many spaces as the novel traces his life. In the US, he’s seen as closer to African than French because of his status as a pied-noir. His French classmates likewise see him as something “less than” French because he never lived in France. Even in his marriage, François is an outsider: Barbara exoticizes him and doesn’t quite see him as “normal.” To her, he’s always foreign.

François also experiences isolation because of his career trajectory. A scholar at heart, he abandons academia in favor of business in order to support his family. However, he’s never happy in the world of commerce and becomes increasingly distraught as he ages. He never feels fully committed to any of his jobs and eventually begins to resent Barbara, without whom he might have become a professor, as he wanted. Their marriage is unhappy, and his attempts to deal with the strain of their relationship come to define him as a character. He’s prone to fits of anger and self-medicates with alcohol. He is, for much of the novel, a sad and broken-hearted man.

Nonetheless, he remains devoted to his sister, Denise. The two were close even as children. Although he found her irritating, he was taught to value family, and at one point he observes of his sister, “[S]he is so annoying,” but he knows that he must be kind to her in order not “to disappoint maman” (26). Passages like this illustrate the importance of family as a value and the emphasis that Gaston and Lucienne placed on it when they were raising their children. François supports Denise both financially and emotionally throughout her life and even buys her an apartment. Although he isn’t religious, he agrees to Denise’s wish that a priest administer him the Last Rites as he’s dying.

He’s also closely bonded with his daughter Chloe, and the two share a passion for writing. François wishes he could have been a writer, and like his wife he nurtures that interest in his daughter. A shared predilection for intellectual pursuits is another trait that binds many members of this family. Although his career was ultimately in business, François’s true gift is for abstract thinking, and Barbara, Denise, and Chloe all share this predisposition.

The novel characterizes François’s sister, Denise, largely through her cultural identity. More than her brother, she feels the push-pull of France and French Algeria. When François immigrates to the US, she remains in Algeria and witnesses firsthand the war for Algerian independence. After Algeria wins and she settles in France, she experiences great prejudice from the French-born French. Her early adults years are marked by a distinct kind of identity confusion in which she repeatedly asks herself “how to reconcile being French and not French at the same time” (152). Denise never truly feels at home anywhere, though she finds friends in Argentina and eventually back in France. She struggles with a feeling of rootlessness and homesickness for much of her life, and this cultural dislocation is at least partly the source of her battles with various mental health conditions.

Denise’s attitudes toward colonialism also help characterize her. Even less circumspect than her father, she has a distinct sense of nostalgia for France’s colonial past. She idealizes the period of French colonial occupation in Algeria and, partly because she experienced so much discrimination in France, keenly identifies as being French Algerian. Colonialism is central to her identity, and she can’t jettison it even as prevailing attitudes toward the French colonial project shift and generations like Chloe’s come to understand the brutal, exploitive nature of colonialism as a system. The novel doesn’t grapple on a grand scale with the oppressive history of colonialism, and although Messud does acknowledge it, largely through the character of Chloe, Denise’s pro-colonial attitude is treated with something akin to compassion. The author paints a portrait of a cultural group (the pieds-noirs) whose entire lives were upended by the collapse of colonialism, and Denise’s nostalgia for it is presented as a distinct kind of loss.

Denise, who was an illness-prone child and struggles with mental health in adulthood, feels alienated from society as a whole. A lonely figure, she often experiences isolation and doesn’t truly find a foothold in any place that she lives after leaving Algeria. Here too her cultural identity defines her: Denise’s inability to find a new home (after French Algeria becomes Algeria) is yet another instance in which the novel depicts the struggle for belonging that typified the pieds-noirs community after Algeria achieved its independence.

Like her mother, Denise is devoutly Catholic. Through her Catholicism, she maintains a connection to France and to the older generations in her family, and her religious beliefs are a direct extension of her mother’s. Denise doesn’t have children of her own but shares a close bond with Chloe, who likewise finds solace in faith and religion. Their enduring commitment to God reflects the idea that it’s possible to retain cultural values even in diaspora.

The wife of François and mother of Chloe, Barbara is another character that the novel introduces through the framework of cultural and national identity. She’s Canadian and white, and though François is also white, her family doesn’t see him as such because of his French Algerian heritage. Barbara views her own white, Western cultural identity as normative and is drawn to François largely because she exoticizes him. Their entire relationship is thus tainted by how Barbara perceives François as different, and she continues to “other” him throughout their lives. She finds his family customs foreign and borderline-backwards, and François keenly feels her judgment. Their disharmony mirrors the broader sense of dislocation and isolation that the Cassar family feels as French Algerians, without a country, adrift in a world in which they feel they have no real place.

Nevertheless, the author humanizes Barbara, and she isn’t entirely an antagonistic character. Intelligent and scholarly, Barbara finds marriage and motherhood stifling. By the time the family settles in Australia, the women’s liberation movement is in full swing, and Barbara falls in with a hippie crowd. She’s described “with her Suzi Quattro shag and her navy windowpane wool bellbottoms” (223), and in this outfit it’s obvious that she represents a more modern woman than her mother or even herself as a college student. In addition, she attends law school and enjoys both the work and the freedom that going to campus in her own car affords her. She nurtures intellectual interests in her daughters, and Chloe later credits Barbara with introducing her to literature. Chloe’s representation of Barbara is rooted in the author’s own experiences: She too credits her mother with nurturing her love for both reading and writing.

Barbara’s fraught marriage to François is likewise central to her character. François gives up an academic career for one in business in order to support his family, and that decision drives a wedge between him and Barbara. In addition to their cultural differences, his sacrifices for the family cause him to develop resentment toward Barbara and the children. This resentment manifests as anger, and Barbara too becomes resentful. She considers leaving him at multiple points in the novel but ultimately realizes that after having made an entire life together, it’s too late. She eventually makes her peace with their marriage, deciding that both good and bad elements are part of both relationships and life, but it’s evident that she’s never truly happy in her marriage.