Francois

“Once upon a time there was a young psychiatrist called Hector who was not very satisfied with himself.”

Hector is dissatisfied because no matter what pills he prescribes, or how much time he spends talking to some of his patients, they come to him unhappy, and leave him unhappy. And thus Hector sets off on a journey across the world, from China, to an African dictatorship to “the Country of More”: America. He wants to find out what makes people happy.

Hector’s de facto father, French author François Lelord, knows a thing or two about cross-Atlantic views of happiness: he’s been a psychiatrist in both France and the US. Neither an autobiography, nor a self-help book, this is the ideal novel to help you get some perspective in your life. Hector might not reveal how to be happy, but he sure will make you smile.

His observations of humankind are spot on. For example, Hector thinks that his businesswoman girlfriend’s theory of management, ‘matrix management’ “sounded like an expression invented by psychiatrists, and so he wasn’t surprised that it created complicated situations and drove people crazy.”

During his travels, Hector meets a wealth of people, some strangers, some old friends. Unfortunately, he is the only one characterised with any real depth and nuance. Hector isn’t perfect: he knows fear, jealousy, selfishness and makes bad choices as much as the rest of us. However, the other characters, particularly women, are rather simplistic and black or white.

François Lelord reminds his readers that they are entirely subject to their narrator. For the sake of twists in the tale, he withholds information at will, using flashbacks at unlikely moments to explain situations that incorporate element of horror or fairy tale. His story-telling is punctuated by “you’re wondering how this could be…” and  “there’s no point in telling you what Hector thought about next, because even if you’re not a psychiatrist you’ve no doubt guessed.”

François Lelord

Lelord’s writing is easy to get into, and translator Lorenza Garcia has done an impressive job in rendering the original, naive and dryly funny style into English. Rather than naming, Lelord describes, child-like, The Financial Times as “a newspaper in English containing rows of numbers”.

He explains homosexuality as: “Jean-Michel and Marcel were more than just friends, or more than just a doctor and his bodyguard, and you’ve also understood why Jean-Michel was never very interested in girls.”

The book is hard to put down once you’ve started it. Luckily, Lelord’s follow-up novel, Hector and the Secrets of Love is out next February, again with publisher Gallic Fiction. It might also soon become a film, made by the team behind The Last Station.

Hector and the Search for Happiness by François Lelord is published by Gallic Fiction and available to buy online here and in all good bookshops.