Lullaby

4 ideas

1. The Massé household and their nanny Louise

   In Paris's 10th arrondissement, lawyer Myriam Massé and her husband Paul, a music producer, hire Louise, a meticulous, indebted white Frenchwoman, to care for their children Mila and Adam so Myriam can return to work. Louise becomes indispensable, cooking, cleaning and joining the family on holiday in Greece, while her own life collapses into eviction and poverty. The novel opens with 'The baby is dead' after Louise has killed both children, then goes back to the hiring and runs forward to that moment.

2. Employers buy intimacy, then disown it

   A household that pays someone to love its children invites her into its most private life while keeping the right to push her back into servitude whenever that is convenient. The nanny is 'almost family' when it suits the employers and staff when it doesn't.

3. Indispensability as the servant's trap

   A worker with no security outside the job makes herself irreplaceable by doing more than she is asked, and so absorbs ever more invisible labour. Her survival then depends on the arrangement lasting. As the children grow toward school, Louise wants the couple to have another baby so she will still be needed, and the perfect employee's devotion becomes the source of the danger.

4. Reveal the ending, audit the ordinary

   Disclosing the catastrophe on the first page turns suspense about what happens into scrutiny of why it happened, so every mundane domestic detail reads as possible evidence. The novel refuses to name a single motive and presents accumulated slights, loneliness and economic humiliation instead. The reader has to accept that ordinary arrangements can build toward horror without any one visible cause.

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