Under the influence

 The Misfortunates, by Dimitri Verhulst, translated by David Colmer, Portobello Books, £12.99, 200 pages

A boy who lived with four drunks, who fell asleep at his school desk because he hadn’t come home from the pub with his father until early in the morning, who cleaned up his father’s vomit and helped him get undressed.” That boy is Dimitri Verhulst, main character of this autobiographical novel by Flemish writer Dimitri Verhulst. There are few working-class novels but The Misfortunates is an even rarer thing: a novel set in the underclass.

The book has been a sensation in Flanders and the Netherlands. The Misfortunates, first published in 2006, is now in its 47th Dutch edition.

The novel’s narrator enters adolescence living “with my father and my uncles and their old mother in Arsendegem, a town the great cart­ographers forgot, an ugly backwater, but a great place for drizzle and pigeon fancying”.

When not in the café, the Verhulst family spends its time smoking, watching bad TV, dodging bailiffs, impregnating unfortunate women, attempting to set official world records for beer drinking and riding in a naked bike race (the latter event a highlight of the 2009 film of the novel). The family’s favourite artist is Roy Orbison, who sings for “misfortunates” around the world.

Most of the book consists of Verhulst recalling the family’s adventures from his tranquil middle age. There isn’t much plot but then these characters are not living linear lives that are meant to take them anywhere. “It was autumn,” the narrator starts one new section, in a parody of a romantic cadence, “but we were on a bender the whole year round and stories about lives like ours generally ignore the seasons.”

Verhulst’s prose is always a delight, deserving its elegant translation by David Colmer, but for perhaps the first half of this short novel you laugh along uneasily. Humour about “chavs” (in Britain) or “white trash” (in the US) is a well-worn genre. At first Verhulst seems simply to be translating the jokes of reality TV series into well-worked prose. No wonder, you think, that The Misfortunates upset the Verhulst family.

The author himself is aware he risks turning his characters into exhibits in a human zoo. Late in the book, when some researchers into folklore unearth the Verhulsts and try to get them to sing their Flemish drinking songs, the main character is outraged: “It was an illusion to think that anyone was genuinely interested in ordinary people.”

The Misfortunates does have its own share of chav-mockery but it ends up transcending that. To the narrator, the Verhulsts are admirable in their own way – certainly preferable to respectable folk. The family is a community (albeit one without wives), centred on its favourite cafés, where the no-good men of the town spend their lives before dying prematurely of lifestyle diseases.

The Verhulsts gradually emerge as bohemians, too wise to buy into the myth of progress that sustains working stiffs. “The misfortunate have a more realistic view of the world,” the narrator claims. In middle age, visiting his grandmother in her old-age home, he notes “the whingeing children other visitors had brought with them as compensation or to emphasise that the oldies’ lives had been passed on, like batons in the perpetual, apparently pointless relay race everyone clung to in the great regrettability of things”. The Verhulsts may make children but they aren’t foolish enough to waste time raising them.

And so the author mostly avoids the main traps in writing about the underclass: he neither mocks his characters, nor feels sorry for them, nor mawkishly holds them up as models for the rest of us. In the end, the narrator is grateful that in adolescence a social worker whisked him from his loving but drunken home, into a succession of children’s homes and foster families.

This is a subtle and wonderfully told story. Two of Verhulst’s previous novels, Problemski Hotel and Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill , have already appeared in English. More ought to follow.

Simon Kuper is an FT columnist