The Empty Housea family novel written by the Touraine writer Laurent Mauvignier and published by Éditions de Minuit, won the most prestigious French literary award, this Tuesday, November 4, 2025. A predictable choice, as this book meets Goncourt’s expectations and shows the limits of this distinction.
— Académie Goncourt (@AcadGoncourt) November 4, 2025
Four generations of women
From a bourgeois home where an old piano is lying around, the novelist traces the thread of his parents’ history: his mother, his grandmother Marguerite, shorn at the Liberation, to this great-grandmother, Marie-Ernestine, who played this piano, dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, loved her teacher, but had to marry another man, unattractive in her eyes, then losing her taste for life, abandoning her child. And, further still, Jeanne-Marie at first submissive, then rough.
Scanning the history of these three generations of women, Laurent Mauvignier signs a text from which men are neither excluded nor secondary, but put aside. As if they were watching their lives more than living them. Husband carrying out endless courtship and relegated out of the marital bedroom, lover frozen and pushed aside, rapist boss caught in the act and German officer passing through out of necessity… All exist but are in a certain way absent. It is a novel of our time in that it takes the opposite view of entire sections of our literature where women played a role of foil.
However, they not only occupy the foreground here, including an economic role, but their lives irrigate the entire narrative thread. Certainly, the novelist navigates here between a little-known universe of literature, the experience of a woman at the end of the 19the century and the more conventional one of the Second World War with “horizontal collaboration”. But it also shows the Great War from the rear, only from the rear.
According to our reading, we will say that it is a fresco and we will salute its scale. Or you will find the journey trying and somewhat long. The precision of the writing, which scrutinizes the characters and their intimacy, will sweep away any reluctance. After all, in an age of brief and ephemeral content, we must salute this faith in the self-sacrifice of its readership: seven hundred and fifty-two pages, six hundred and seventy-five grams of paper, that’s not nothing.
Homemade imagination
But back to the price. What do we expect from a Goncourt? The prize is intended to reward “the best work of imagination in prose, published during the year”. Curiously, the academy invited Nathacha Appanah (Night in the HeartFémina 2025 prize awarded on November 3) and Emmanuel Carrère (Kolkhoz) for autobiographical stories in which imagination does not play a big role. Sign of a constant evolution in French literature, the imagination of which is increasingly limited to the umbilical cord.
Certainly, Laurent Mauvignier fits into this vein of the family novel, but he does so with a distance that is eminently literary. Like any member of a family confronted with a family tree, he has fragments. Photos, administrative acts, letters, a few stories or anecdotes passed down from one generation to another, undoubtedly also a few newspaper articles or account books (his ancestors owned a large farm), a house, the famous piano, a cherry tree.
Making archives into a novel
From this raw material, which becomes more and more modest as he goes back through the years, he must extract a story. Unwinding a thread, weaving a plot and characters, filling in the gaps, asking questions, looking for answers, trying to guess the essence of the characters: the work of a novelist if ever there was one. What did Marie-Ernestine feel, what did she say, with what intonation? The Empty House is also an invitation to enter a literary creation workshop. It’s up to him to invent the thoughts, the inner workings of the protagonists and their relationships. To make fictional characters from a few archives and unverifiable hypotheses.
A work of invention, but also the work of a puppeteer arranging his characters. On many occasions, we will be tempted to say that he has chosen not the possibly disappointing truth, but the most desirable path, the one which satisfies us and guarantees empathy with the characters. And then? As a novelist, he investigates but in no way obliges himself to write a report. So, it doesn’t matter whether everything is false or true, or even whether the truth is somewhere in between. He is a novelist who writes and no longer an archivist. And it then produces a “work of imagination”.
It is heartbreaking to say, the critical enthusiasm around The Empty House testifies to the great poverty of contemporary novelistic production.
Unfortunately, this “psychologization” of the characters leads to lengths. This is the main weakness of this story, which fears neither variations nor repetitions, at the risk of tiring and encouraging a diagonal reading.
Sometimes, however, he manages to achieve the universal. By reminding us of the lives of our grandmothers, often shadowy women, he brings faded photos to life. He brings them out of the shadows to restore their unique story, made up of shattered talents, repressed passions or shameful pleasures. Who doesn’t have in their attic this dignified and formal portrait of one of those women about whom we know nothing? It is therefore not the story of his family that he tells, but that of a collective memory, in a historical framework that is familiar to us: the two world wars have haunted French literature for decades.
A good book in a mediocre literary season
Finally, and it is heartbreaking to say it, the critical enthusiasm around The Empty House testifies to the great poverty of contemporary novelistic production. Such a book should be the standard, reflecting a certain level of editorial standards. We are far from it. The fashion for egocentric narrative (pronounced “autofiction”) has produced a whole laborious literature in which individual experience is spread out without ever being able to claim the universal. Mediocre and quickly forgotten texts, a mirror to the larks of young feathers in search of glory. Laurent Mauvignier demonstrates that it is possible to escape from this trap.
For all these reasons, The Empty House will probably fulfill its role: allowing a writer to pay a lot of taxes, replenishing the booksellers’ coffers, cluttering up Christmas trees.
Finally, note that this is only the fourth Goncourt prize for Éditions de Minuit, after those awarded to Marguerite Duras (The Lover1984), Jean Rouaud (The Fields of Honor1990) and Jean Echenoz (I’m leaving1999) – compared to thirty-nine for Gallimard (Real Madrid of Drouant), seventeen for Grasset and twelve for Albin Michel. Good news for this house with parsimonious publications, renowned for its selectivity.
