Reading Jean-Claude Izzo’s “A Sun for the Dying” in tandem
with George Orwell’s “Down and Out in London and Paris” gave me a double dose
of insight into the plight of the homeless people I see every day on my way to
and from work. In this time of mortgage foreclosures, crushing student loan
debt, and an extraordinarily difficult job market, it also made me think of how
close so many people are to the edge.
Izzo’s novel shows how a person’s bad decisions, coupled
with family’s and associates’ equally bad behavior and a stroke or two of bad
fortune, can leave someone homeless, penniless, and in ill health, with no
chance of climbing back to the upper middle class from which he came. Orwell’s
nonfiction account of his own temporary experience with homelessness and
poverty in Paris and London during the 1930s contains many similar elements.
If the title alone of “A Sun for the Dying” weren’t enough
to clue you in, by the time you read the prologue, which recounts the last few
hours of Titi, a homeless man, on a wintry Paris metro platform, you know the
story is not going to lift up your spirits. For Rico, Izzo’s chief protagonist,
Titi’s death is a turning point. The two depended on each other not only to
share any slight windfalls either might encounter but also, at least as
important, to buck up each other’s spirits. Their companionship has provided
each with a reason to keep going. Though Rico was the stronger of the two, once
Titi, his best and only friend, is gone, he spirals downward even more rapidly.
Though Rico wasn’t a likeable character for me, he’s not an
unusual person. As the narrative progresses, we learn that not too long before
Titi’s death he had a good job, a beautiful wife, a son, a really nice house,
and a similarly upscale social circle. But nothing and no one stays the same. A
chain of events ends with Rico losing everything he has and ending up homeless
on the streets of Paris.
You might think that a person in Rico’s position should go
to his family, if he has one, for support and a place to stay while he gets
back on his feet. Indeed, Rico’s father is alive and clearly well able to offer
his son a helping hand. But he’s not a likeable character, either. He’s been
out of Rico’s life for many years and, on reencountering his son, seems completely
uninterested in his condition or in reestablishing any sort of relationship,
let alone helping him out.
You might also think that France’s socialized institutions
would provide Rico with support. Not in Izzo’s book; whatever services or
organizations there are in France that help the poor are largely absent from
the story.
Orwell, whose real-life descent into living on the edge was
precipitated by a theft, describes exactly how it feels. From chapter 3: “You
discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke
you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare
not admit it – you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From
the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can
hardly manage it.” He continues to describe the precariousness of life on the
edge, how just staying alive consumes him, and how any deviation from his
strict centime-pinching regimen throws his entire life off. Eighty years later,
his description of a homeless person’s daily life on another continent is as
vivid and about as accurate, I don’t doubt, as it was then.
