- Even more than love, devotion resonates with the idea of the sacred: what meaning does the title of your novel have for you? And what is it about the father-daughter relationship that elevates it to the level of the absolute?

Beyond the sacred - that is, the idea of an attachment to religious practices - I wanted to get hold of a sort of connection that is silent but very powerful and which is held for years in solitude, like a sort of profane piety. I also think that the title of my novel has an increasingly ironic ring as the book progresses. Without giving away the plot, we see that the devotion is not necessarily just on the father's side (despite appearances) but in fact more on the daughter's, manifested in written form, the ultimate testimony of a communion recreated through letters. The meaning of the title can also be understood as the way in which real relationships can be lived more in the absence of the object than in its presence. My characters usually demonstrate feelings that are more intense in the absence than in the reality of a relationship. From out of which arises their tendency to fetishise people. I remember having been very struck by this aspect of Henry James's novels. It is an aspect of the 'Master' that Colm Toibin brings out very well in his last novel about James, notably in his relationship with his sister Alice, his cousin Minnie Temple and his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson. I don't know if I believe in the absolute of family relationships: it is simply a 'fertile' compost that is conducive to an explosion of the tragic in a fictional setting. To be more precise, I also see father-daughter relationships or brother-sister relationships as life experiences that can give us the illusion of a 'reconciled' or integrated life.

- So does "the kiss" between the father and daughter (or between the brother and sister in School's Out) go back to this same desire for the absolute, for a need for a total communion, or is it rather a way of asking for and giving forgiveness?

That is a very subtle way of seeing the act. At first glance, it could be interpreted as an act of incest. It contains, in my eyes, the desperate dimension of an attempt to attain the other's body, in its warmth and materiality, which is doomed to failure because it always ends badly. But there is a quest for communion that is experienced as a quest for a certain consolation. That is why bodily positions, their movement in the presence of another, is very detailed in my novels. There is perhaps a very puritan aspect to my books that is, I think, totally ignored in our Latin culture (which values sex as an affirmation of oneself: joyous, hedonistic sex - hence the success of Michel Onfray) but to which Anglo-Saxons (who have read James, Hawthorne and Thomas Hardy) are often more sensitive. The flesh isn't sad in my books - it is dangerous. It is a movement towards the other (which could be someone from one's own family) that is infinitely risky. It seems to me that that act of communion is not a request for forgiveness. I do not in general believe in the concept of redemption; mistakes are made and one lives with them, that is all. There is neither redemption nor pardon. This gives a rather Calvinist aspect to my books that is indeed somewhat glacial. This is the tragedy of all my novels: the characters want to 'explain' everything to each other, while knowing that communication is doomed to failure or incompleteness. But I sometimes say to myself that the poignant and disillusioned side of some of my books perhaps lies in this attempt, this moving out of oneself, rather than in any real accomplishment involving a happy ending and a bright new dawn.

- Dévotion is the tale of an impossible filial love that is eaten away by guilt and the impossibility of explanation and communication. This inability is at the origin of the drama that plays out between Simon and his daughter Marion. However, they seem to be able to have a form of dialogue through Marion's letters, discovered after her death. Does the written form seem to you the only way, almost an outlet, in which one can express one's feelings?

There is indeed a whole underlying vision of literature, which you sum up well, which emerges through this novel. One cannot say anything to people but one can tell them anything - that is something of a motto for me. I am deeply convinced that communication between people happens through writing, even if it is somewhat incomplete and lacks direct confrontation. To paraphrase Marguerite Duras, I don't know anyone who has so little of a life as me, and I am not complaining about that. I believe that one cannot live and write at the same time and that the latter activity enables us to formulate better the formless and disconcerting magma that is our own existence. I have always had the impression that I am better understood through what I write than through what I live, that I express more and am more accurate in my feelings and emotions. In human relationships, one always cheats a little. Fiction, which is paradoxically the art of the false, seems to me to make authenticity (if this word has any meaning) more possible. It is an approach to oblique truth to which I am very attached. A creative work is in my view a form of response to the very particular misery of cyclical existence that is doomed to futility and nothingness. Foolishly, it seems to me that life only has full meaning when it is revised by literature, in terms of writing as well as reading. Marion is someone who realises very young that the world around her is neither real nor well-meaning. She finds through her letters a sort of existential adhesive that enables her to escape the torpor and boredom of her adolescence. She doesn't know, at the time, if they will ever be read. She composes nothing other than the music of her own survival. To sum up, in the manner of Marion, writing represents definitively more than an outlet for me; it is a world in which life takes 'shape'.

- We also see in Dévotion the same relationship with death as in School's Out: a death that is revelatory, even liberating. Is death the only possible outcome? Is it the only way in which your characters can finally understand themselves?

I don't know if death is revelatory in my books. It is certainly liberating. The adolescents in School's Out, just like Marion in Dévotion, feel that their life is mutilated and cut off from the foundation on which it was built. They cannot manage to build new meaning on the ruins of their shattered illusions. They often choose reclusion, as if they have to pay for having believed for too long in these illusions. In that sense, my books do not talk about redemption but about expiation. Death is not the only possible outcome. For some of my characters there are works that serve as a sort of consolation, as well as attempts to reconnect what has been separated. All this preoccupies them enormously, as well as a guilt about existing, a feeling of having escaped from some obscure disaster.

- In Dévotion, although it is also true of your other novels, the child runs up against the world of adults in an extremely brutal way. But, paradoxically, it is also the child who demonstrates a terrible cruelty towards the adults, who prefer to escape a reality that is too difficult by taking refuge in their own world or in solitude. As if it were children who are most sharply aware of the world and its horrors?

Absolutely. It is a very powerful idea that one finds in the writings of J G Ballard (I am thinking of the magnificent Running Wild) and of Ian McEwan. In France, we have a sentimental and sanitised vision of childhood. If we reread Thomas Hardy's Jude or Henry James's What Maisie Knew, we see that they are two literary monuments to the glory of children's lucidity - and also their depravity. When I was a child, I knew that adults were permanently lying, that they were sad about not living the life that they had once wished for and that they spun themselves tales to avoid having to shoulder the responsibility for their failure. I often talked about that with my friends and everyone knew about it. We also knew where the holes in their system were and where we could attack to get certain advantages. And I don't think I was particularly unnatural... I was just a child. Now I've grown up and understood why we need to spin ourselves stories to survive. I believe that we go into writing from melancholy (a period has come to an end, that happy time before "anyone had died" as Pessoa said) and it is also through writing that one emerges from it.

- Your writing seeks to describe with precision people's material environment, their gestures, their exact position in their surroundings. What importance do you attach to this precision? Is it a way of making your characters the prisoners of the reality in which they are submerged?

I have always preferred 'tactile', almost phenomenological, writers who love detailing with precision atmosphere as well as descriptions of places and people. In writing, I realised that paradoxically the more one forced a kind of hyper-realism of outline, the more the narrative and characters seemed to dissolve into a sort of blur and indeterminacy. I also use a lot of psychology to describe the interior life of my characters, which is very poorly viewed in France since the "Nouveau Roman"' which prefers behaviourism, perhaps believing that a character seems more profound if he is described only by his acts and gestures. Foreign novels are more daring and that is why they influence me more. And then I think we have realised that there is cod psychology and the brilliant and subtle psychology of Marivaux or Henry James. I don't know if the importance I attach to precision is linked to the desire to make my characters prisoners of objects or their environment. It's an interesting question that I'll have to reflect on...

London, April 2006