The Thibaults

Antoine and Jacques Thibault grow up under Oscar Thibault, a wealthy Catholic patriarch whose authority is absolute and whose two sons metabolize it in opposite directions: Antoine becomes a rigorous, secular-minded doctor who channels his father's discipline into science and order, while Jacques becomes a writer and eventually a revolutionary socialist, rebelling against everything Oscar represents. Martin du Gard spends the novel's early volumes on the ordinary texture of that divergence, a runaway adventure with a Protestant friend, a stint in reform school, a slow drift toward opposite ends of belief, before the later volumes, most famously Summer 1914, widen the frame until the brothers' private argument is dwarfed by an entire continent's diplomatic failure to stop a war neither of them wants.

The Summer 1914 volumes track the July crisis almost hour by hour, cabinet meetings, telegrams, socialist congresses debating a general strike that never quite happens, and the effect is cumulative rather than dramatic: nobody in the novel makes one decisive villainous choice, the war simply arrives because enough separate, locally reasonable decisions add up to catastrophe. Jacques's own antiwar activism, culminating in a doomed attempt to distribute pacifist leaflets by air over the front lines, reads as the novel's most direct statement that individual conviction, however sincere, is no match for a mechanism this large once it's already moving.

After being gassed near the front, Antoine spends the novel's final volume dying slowly and keeping a diary that Martin du Gard lets run for pages at a time, a document less about self-pity than about a rationalist trying to make some final accounting of what his life and his century have amounted to. That diary becomes his address to the future in the most literal sense: he directs part of it toward Jean-Paul, Jacques's infant son by Jenny de Fontanin, a nephew Antoine comes to love with an intensity that surprises him, as if watching his dead brother's features resurface in the child were the only kind of continuity the war has left him capable of believing in.