By Maria Bregman
There is a certain kind of French novel that functions as a high-end emotional spa for the international reader. In its pages, beautiful, intelligent people suffer beautifully and intelligently in beautiful, old houses, preferably in the countryside. Their despair is exquisitely articulated, their wine is always seasonal, and their pain feels comfortingly universal. Olivier Adan’s Under the Roses fits this description so perfectly it feels less like a novel and more like a luxury good, precision-engineered for a specific demographic. It arrives garlanded with praise for its Chekhovian nuance and its poignant exploration of ‘timeless’ family themes.
This is a load of bollocks.
Adan’s book is not a timeless drama; it is a clinical, and deeply chilling, diagnosis of a very timely disease. It is an autopsy of the modern professional soul, hollowed out by the relentless performance of its own success. The comparison to Chekhov is a category error of the most revealing kind. Chekhov’s characters were tragic because they were aristocrats at the end of a historical paradigm, rendered obsolete by forces they could not comprehend. Adan’s characters are tragic because they are the high priests of the current paradigm. Their problem is not obsolescence. It is their total, soul-crushing relevance to a system that demands everything from them and gives them nothing but money in return. This isn’t The Cherry Orchard. It is a hushed, elegant scream from the heart of late-stage capitalism.
The novel’s setup is a familiar one. Three adult siblings gather at the family home following the death of their father. We have the archetypes: Paul, the successful but ‘strange, cold, detached’ film director; Antoine, the pragmatic, top-manager corporate soldier; and Claire, the responsible older sister, buckling under the weight of holding everything together. The death of the patriarch acts as the catalyst, forcing a confrontation with the past and the quiet disappointments of the present.
A Distressed Asset
But to read this as a purely psychological drama is to miss the economic skeleton upon which the story is hung. The father’s death is not just a personal loss; it represents the collapse of the last pre-neoliberal structure in their lives. He was the guarantor of a world where value was not determined solely by the market. As one character muses, ‘One might think the whole structure was held up by Dad until now’. With him gone, the family is revealed for what it is: a distressed asset, a holding company of resentments and unfulfilled desires, its members suddenly forced to reckon with the spiritual debt they have accrued.
The brothers, in particular, are not merely characters; they are competing models of survival in the brutal marketplace of modern identity. Paul, the artist, performs a brand of cold, creative genius. His detachment is not a personality trait; it is a professional requirement, a carefully cultivated mystique necessary for his position in the ‘creative economy’. Antoine is his perfect mirror. He performs conformity, pretending to his colleagues that he shares their contempt for the ‘ordinary life’ he secretly craves – a life of family breakfasts, forgotten scarves, and being asked to buy bread on the way home.
This is the novel’s devastating core. The simple, domestic pleasures of an ‘ordinary life’ have been transformed into a luxury good that these hyper-successful men are psychologically incapable of affording. They are like master chefs who have lost the ability to taste their own food. Their lives are a performance of success for an unseen audience, and they have forgotten how to leave the stage. As Antoine laments, ‘As if there were another one. As if someone had something else, more solid, stashed away in a warehouse. Some serious, long-term alternative’. There isn’t. This is it. And the recognition of that fact is the source of the novel’s quiet, ambient terror.
I remember once, years ago, being taken on a tour of a vast, silent banking headquarters in Paris. It was a cathedral of glass and steel, filled with people moving with a kind of hushed, efficient purpose. They were all performing their roles with impeccable professionalism. The silence wasn’t peaceful; it was the sound of immense, sublimated pressure. That is the silence that permeates Adan’s novel. It is the sound of the modern bourgeois man, who, in the words of the book, moves ‘at a terrible speed from the category of young pricks to the category of old pricks’, without ever passing through a state of simple personhood.
The Beautiful Boredom
The defenders of this kind of fiction will, of course, argue that its power lies in its very refusal of a political agenda. The novel itself seems to pre-emptively pat itself on the back for this, with one character expressing a preference for literature ‘far from fashionable social themes… that doesn’t claim to analyse the sicknesses of the age’. This is a neat little trick. But to declare oneself ‘outside the agenda’ in a world like ours is the most profoundly political, and most profoundly conservative, move of all. It is the quiet, desperate attempt of a privileged class to frame its structural economic anxieties as a personal, existential malaise. It insists the sickness is in the soul, not the system, because the soul can be treated with therapy and a good bottle of Côtes du Rhône, whilst the system might require a revolution.
And yet, one must admit, the prose is exquisite. The seasonal wine does taste, even on the page, like a small, perfect surrender. And that is precisely the danger.
The novel seduces us with its beauty, its quiet intelligence, its relatable sadness. We are invited to nod along sagely as Claire receives an explicit call from her lover during her father’s funeral and reflects on how life becomes a ‘grandiose farce’. It is tragic, yes, but it is also so very… French. So very literary.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the deepest fear in this book is not death. It is redundancy. It is the terror of discovering that the life you have painstakingly built, the career you have sacrificed for, the performance you have perfected, means absolutely nothing outside the economic framework that gives it value. The father’s death is terrifying not because he is gone, but because he represents a form of being that is no longer possible.
The rose garden of the title is not Chekhov’s cherry orchard. The orchard was chopped down by the brute force of a new economic reality. The rose garden in Adan’s novel is in no such danger. It will be impeccably maintained, its upkeep outsourced to a local service. It will look perfect on Instagram. No one, however, will ever have the time to simply sit in it. The tragedy is not that the garden will be sold. The tragedy is that it won’t be, and no one will ever truly live in it again. It has ceased to be a home and has become, like the characters themselves, a beautifully maintained, and entirely hollow, asset.
