The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

From Maigret’s Room by John Lanchester.

The​ cosiness and comfort are needed to balance the harshness of Simenon’s worldview. The canvas is primed with domesticity; the picture painted on it is in dark shades. Maigret is often given credit as a person who understands, whose strength is patience, empathy, a reluctance to judge. And yet the things he understands are desperately bleak. In this, Simenon is true to the French literary code. The reader whose idea of the novel is formed by the English canon may at some stage start to read books in the French tradition. At that point, it may suddenly seem that everything one has previously read has essentially been children’s literature. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment, happy endings and love conquering all. The side notes and off notes and internal dissent are all there, of course, but they are subtextual, subtle, inexplicit. The main current of the English novel is in the direction of Happy Ever After, along the lines of Lady Bracknell’s deathless observation: ‘The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’ When you turn from that tradition to the work of Laclos, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Maupassant and Proust, it’s like getting a glass of ice water in the face. Everybody lies all the time; codes of honour are mainly a delusion and will get you into serious trouble; the same goes for love; if you think the world is how it is described in consoling fictions, you have many catastrophic surprises in store. Above all, the central lesson of the French tradition is that people’s motives are sex and money, and you can write about those things as sex and money, directly, no euphemisms required.