Supermarkets. What are they? Places to shop, to fill your fridge? Sociologists have argued that they are “non-places” – soulless, inferior to more modestly sized grocers, evidence of the horrors of modern agronomics, shrines to the banality of consumerism. For Don DeLillo, in White Noise, a supermarket “changes us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway … All the letters and numbers are here, all the colours of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases.”
Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature, sees supermarkets as a spectacle and a kind of commons. In no other space, private or public, are people “brought into greater contact with their fellow humans”. Yet, because shopping is often portrayed as a chore, and a female chore at that, supermarkets are ignored by “politicians, journalists, ‘experts’”, who, as a result, “do not know the social reality of France today”.
Look at the Lights, My Love is a diaristic essay, begun in November 2012, published in France in 2014, and now translated into English for the first time by Alison L Strayer. Ernaux charts a year’s visits to an Auchan superstore in Cergy in the north-western suburbs of Paris, part of the Trois-Fontaines shopping centre. “When you walk by it late at night, after getting off the commuter train, its silent mass is more desolate than a cemetery.” Even so, suffering from writer’s block, she heads there to “escape from loneliness”.
In her telling, supermarkets are more than retail hubs, they are microclimates. “Walking around in a warm atmosphere wherever you go is almost like stepping off a plane in Cairo on arrival from Paris.” Like casinos, they’re severed from their surroundings. It’s easy to lose your bearings. “Because there are no clocks, time is nowhere to be seen.” Temperature is regulated, shelves are rotated and refreshed, the ambience is carefully modulated. To go inside is “to abruptly land in the effervescence, trepidation, and sparkle of things”.
Ernaux, who will turn 83 this autumn, remembers when supermarkets were new additions to the urban landscape. “I felt a secret thrill to be at the very heart of hypermodernity, which, for me, the place symbolized in a fascinating way. It was like an existential promotion.” Her book’s most acute moments are all set in the past – memories of an early visit to a Carrefour, where she filled a trolley to the brim because “we feared a total lack of food supplies”; a favourite Intermarché where “tears came to my eyes with the thought that I would never buy chocolate there again for my mother, who had just died”.
Look at the Lights has less to say about the here and now. This may be because Ernaux barely ever talks to staff and customers in Auchan. When she does, the exchanges are stilted. About a worker tending to russet apples, she confesses, “I would like to ask him about his salary. I don’t dare. I am unable to step outside my status of customer.” Would it be any less forward for a non-customer to ask a stranger how much they are paid? There are brief mentions of a garment factory fire in Bangladesh, but, strangely for a writer who has always been eloquent about her working-class background, she treats the supermarket as an isolated entity divorced from the struggles of farmers or hauliers.
Ernaux has described her writing style as “flat”. Here, too often, it is patronising. She ties herself in knots about whether to describe people in the supermarket as “black”. There’s an excruciating passage when, describing how poorer customers are likely to check the prices of items rather than just chuck them in a trolley, she writes what she thinks is going through their heads: “The humiliation inflicted by commercial goods: they are too expensive, so I’m worth nothing.”
Supermarkets are important. Supermarkets are rich in stories. Few, though, emerge from this grab-bag of jottings, which is too presumptuous and banal to merit being published in this raw state. “I have trouble discerning and comprehending the present moment,” Ernaux says, and she has a point.
• Look at the Lights, My Love, translated by Alison L Strayer, is published by Yale (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
