Recommendations
Books Like Les Choses by Georges Perec
Books for readers who loved the consumer desire and Perec's portrait of a generation defined by the things it cannot afford
Les Choses (1965) is Perec's short sociological debut — a couple whose inner life is entirely organised around beautiful objects they cannot afford, in a portrait of consumer capitalism's colonisation of desire. These 8 books share its study of bourgeois aspiration and the unhappiness it generates, its sociological eye, and its portrait of a generation shaped by consumer society.
- 1
Buy on AmazonLa Vie mode d'emploi
by Georges Perec
The major work — thirteen years later and a different formal register, but the same preoccupation with things, lists, and the stories that objects contain; the natural next Perec after Les Choses.
- 2
Buy on AmazonW ou le souvenir d'enfance
by Georges Perec
The autobiographical Perec — the childhood behind the consumer adult; reading W reveals the depth of loss that underlies Les Choses's sociological surface.
- 3
Buy on AmazonSentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert
The foundational French novel of unsatisfied bourgeois desire — Frédéric Moreau's generation defined by its failure to achieve what it aspired to; Les Choses is the 1960s version of the same diagnosis.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The American family defined by its relationship to the consumer goods of the 1990s — Franzen's sociological satire of late capitalism's effects on family life is the closest American equivalent to Les Choses.
- 5
Buy on AmazonMythologies
by Roland Barthes
Barthes's essays on the myths of everyday French consumer life — the theoretical companion to Les Choses; Perec was deeply influenced by Barthes, and reading Mythologies alongside Les Choses illuminates exactly what Perec was doing.
- 6
Buy on AmazonRevolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
An American couple in the suburbs defined by their aspirations and their inability to achieve them — the American version of the same diagnosis; Jérôme and Sylvie are the Parisian counterparts of Frank and April Wheeler.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Beautiful Boy
by Bret Easton Ellis
Consumer desire as the substance of adolescent identity — the American 1980s version of the 1960s Paris world of Les Choses; both novels are about people whose inner life has been entirely colonised by the objects of consumer culture.
- 8
Buy on AmazonAmerican Pastoral
by Philip Roth
The Swede's perfect consumer life destroyed from within — Roth's portrait of post-war American prosperity and its discontents is the American equivalent of Perec's portrait of post-war French consumer society.
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