Pierre Lemaitre Closes the Pelletier Saga with 'Grandes promesas': An Ending Worthy of Its Ambition
Let's do this differently.
The executive summary, for those who need it now: Pierre Lemaitre has published Grandes promesas, closing Les Années glorieuses, his saga about the Pelletier family. Four novels, four decades of France, from the ruins of the First World War to the early nineteen-sixties. A family Lemaitre has used as a distorting mirror for an entire country. If you've been waiting to start the series, it can now be read in full, in order, without waiting.
Now, for those of us who need to process this slowly.
Do you know that feeling when you finish the last book in a long saga—and by long I mean years of your life, not just pages—and you don't quite know what to do with yourself? The Pelletier saga is exactly that kind of project. Lemaitre began it as a thriller and it drifted into something that no longer fits a single category: social novel, family saga, chronicle of ambition, portrait of how a nation can lie to itself for decades and keep functioning.
The starting point is the shattered France of the post-1918 years, and each volume advances in time with its own collective crisis: the Second World War, the Occupation, the Liberation, the reconstruction. The Pelletiers traverse all of them with a single constant: that illusions and money rarely arrive together. This is Balzac with better pacing. Zola with less patience for systematic naturalism. Also Lemaitre being thoroughly Lemaitre—who, before this saga, had already given us a first-rate crime trilogy and won the Prix Goncourt with Au revoir là-haut. At some point he decided that the thriller was too small a container for what he had to say.
Grandes promesas is set in Paris, 1960-1964, and critics describe it as a dark portrait of ambition. That is another way of saying Lemaitre does not soften the ending for our comfort. Which is, at bottom, exactly what we expected of him.
We live in the age of fan service, of endings designed to send everyone home satisfied. Lemaitre does the opposite. He has built a saga that looks history in the face and concludes that the twentieth century was, basically, a series of broken great promises. Is the title ironic? Perhaps. Is it also completely literal? Yes. Depending on the angle, both are simultaneously true.
Have you been meaning to start the saga? Now is the time.
