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Ruth-Maria Thomas | Die zweitgrößte Liebe | dtv | 304 pages | 24 EUR

Telling the Story of Calculations

Sitting on the floor, Michelle takes stock of her life. It costs: 820 euros in rent, a bus ticket, electricity, water, tampons. She pulls money out of the coffee tin, counts the notes, checks the banking app, lays out her life before her. It's the same way in which she savours the dampness of an autumn morning, the frisson on her way to Henry’s, a martini with the taste of the olive on the rim. To list Michelle’s life in ‘Love Story’, as ‘East vs. West’ or the subtle differences arising from the unequal distribution of capital, would tell us a great deal – but nothing of its concrete nature.
Die zweitgrößte Liebe (The Second Greatest Love) portrays a character living in relative poverty, without dramatising or romantising her life. The novel does not follow any theoretical framework regarding inequality or precariousness, nor does it engage in ‘proletarian pornography’ like some other ‘class fiction’ (apart from the coded Leo bathrobe).
Die zweitgrößte Liebe deals with capital-based power within a heterosexual couple’s relationship. Henry is Michelle's second greatest love; her first - the third party, coming between them - is the cost of everything. She has to pay off debts because nobody in her family was able to set money aside for her, her jewellery shop went bust during the pandemic, and there is no inheritance, only exorbitant rents. The stress seeps into her life, interrupts the narrative and becomes typographically legible in the form of calculations and mental asides.
Is this her life, or merely its framework? Can this be a love story?

Materialities: Love and Differences

Michelle meets Henry at the hotel: he is a guest; she works there. The attraction takes hold of them both and feels light; at times, it tips over into a formulaic language of love. Yet when Michelle’s ‘fingers were still leaving smudges as she wrote: shall we go to the planetarium together on Saturday?’, the relationship becomes so immediate that we almost forget it is build on language. No punctuation, no capitalisation: the words take a backseat behind the experience. The love story reads quickly, easily, so beautifully ideologically shaped. Love appears as something that simply happens and requires no explanation, which is why it is all the more disconcerting when Henry thinks that Michelle ‘can’t really afford not to love him’. In the pages that follow, this reveals the flip side of those scenes in which being in love is described as so close and immediate.
Michelle immerses herself in Henry’s life; for her, his family is a source of tranquillity: There’s plenty of space in the house, there are resources for rituals, cosy meals together, lounging on the sofa. She strikes up a friendly relationship with Carlotta, Henry’s sister. And yet she never quite feels comfortable there; in these moments, she feels particularly conscious of her background. It is a physical experience – fabrics against the skin, whose social materiality Michelle suddenly senses; fabrics that for her are unimaginable but which Carlotta, out of boredom, asks for as a birthday present.

No desire for an ‘East Safari’

At the same time, Michelle’s background is not a lonely place. A colleague “had also moved there from Lusatia; they got on straight away”. The region appears as a historically conditioned environment that shapes a sense of belonging and self-esteem.
When Henry wants to take her to Lusatia, she refuses to subject the region to “a safari”. “She’s not up for that.” Michelle senses how Henry would behave there, because she knows the power dynamics from her own experience. It’s questionable whether he understands what she means by “safari”.

Pushing the boundaries of class

When her first boyfriend injures her with a pair of nail scissors during sex at the age of 16 – because Michelle wants to break up with him – she gets a rose tattooed over the scar on her thigh and spends the next few months waiting outside his house to intercept his bills. The ones from the jobcentre with suggestions for job placement interviews and demands for payment. Occasionally she steals and uses what she’s saved to pay off her debts. At work, the men she has to serve wink at her; one even whistles at her. She knows she can’t afford to lose her temper and tell them what she really thinks. But she can’t just do nothing either. 

“And so she secretly spat into the schnapps she served them at the end of the evening, at the establishment’s invitation.” 

In the face of the limitations imposed on her as a half-orphan, as a woman, in a world that exacts a heavy toll, all of this is creative self-defence.

There she is, and she is wide awake: On situational rather than imitative writing

“There she is, a woman diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.” This is not a quote from Michelle, who loves taking warm showers and who, several times, describes love and money as a warm shower. This sentence precedes the text and is part of the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. The novel has been interpreted as ‘weird girl fiction’ (1), as a tale of late-capitalist exhaustion, or as a revolt against it. Its protagonist vegetates in her flat, addicted to pills. But that is how she wants it. Her obstinacy makes it difficult to interpret her as a specific socio-cultural figure.
The Second Greatest Love could also have begun with a quotation from the now almost canonical texts on class. Maybe a passage from Retour à Reims by Didier Eribon – thus building a bridge from Reims to Lusatia, places that have fallen into political oblivion and whose economic consequences are becoming increasingly radicalised, not only in terms of rural exodus and crumbling infrastructure, but particularly through right-wing extremism. This would have been more relevant, not only geographically, but culturally too. Instead, however, the epigraph shifts the text towards a novel, which it follows narratively. The quotation from Mosfegh’s novel, unlike the literary text of sociologist Eribon, is not an ethnographic, retrospective and detached introspection. It is not a sentence that seeks to explain social conditions, but a style of writing that immerses itself in a woman’s lived experience, whilst remaining perfectly lucid. 
It is precisely this kind of writing—one that does not categorise but rather experiences—that also characterises The Second Greatest Love. Therein lies the strength of the novel, which does not write about class but trusts in class: the narrative voice, which in most places is identical to Michelle’s, needs no Bourdieu-books to retrospectively validate her perceptions, even though she notices them on Henry’s bookshelf. 

She sees and feels for herself: 

“She considered going in, sitting down there, crossing her legs and ordering a martini; her tight black skirt would sit just above her pubic area. […] The guests were dressed differently from what she’d expected. More understated. No designer labels on their shirts, not an excessive amount of bling; the fabrics were flowing and lint-free. […] With the perfume worn in the lobby over the course of a single day, she could probably have paid her rent for a year.”

Michelle knows how men look at her. She has learnt that the wealthy guests do not dress ostentatiously, but that luxury is understated and effortless. She can recognise it. All her life, through necessity, she has observed; in this sense, she has developed – if you will – a ‘literacy’ of womanhood and class forged from everyday life. Being a woman in her own right – a woman in debt, no capital behind her, instead burdened by the anxiety, psychological strain and so on that come with a precarious situation – makes observation and learning essential for survival. 
Thomas’s narrative approach thus achieves something that remains a constant point of contention for Didier Eribon or even for Edouard Louis, another ‘class writer’: as the latter employ a method of ethnographic retracing, a distinction remains between the earlier ‘self’ described and its language, and the present one, since the narrative position is endowed with greater capital, knowledge and a different language. In Louis’s Changer: Méthode, this approach is already implied in the title. Even though Louis’s work does not tell a story of social advancement, but rather one in which the experience of class permeates right into the new ‘I’, repeatedly unsettling it, it works with the class-based differences that tend to de-individualise the narrative figure. 
In Thomas’s work, by contrast, a female narrator speaks from the present; she also reflects from her position, but above all situationally, with an idiosyncratic self-assurance. (2) 
 

‘And Henry thought she was ashamed.’

Shame, writes Annie Ernaux, makes us believe we are alone with it.  (3) The Gisèle Pelicot trial has transformed shame into a demand. Under the slogan ‘La honte doit changer de camp’ ( 'shame must change sides'), women are joining in solidarity, taking to the streets together and attempting to bring the perpetrators and societal causes of shame to light. Michelle, too, in The Second Greatest Love, is not alone. She stands alongside her colleague from Lusatia, her single-parent mother, and young women – “images within her, like flashes of light […] they understood everything, looked at one another and knew: it was about themselves”.
Michelle has to do the maths because she can’t afford not to. Yet Thomas’s plan doesn’t add up in this equation. The narrative notes her desire and the sweetness of the sour apple rings on her fingers, and her infatuation: Michelle’s rebellion, which is neither a rags-to-riches story nor a social study, but rather a voice: in the moment during a smoking break on the hotel balcony, on the floor, on the scooter – a character, a woman. And Henry thought she was ashamed.

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(1) This novel is also interpreted as marking the beginning of ‘unhinged woman literature’ or ‘sad girl literature’. These texts tell the stories of women whose cynicism and self-harming behaviour become legible against the backdrop of post-feminist neoliberalism. Their characters are often white, financially secure and conventionally attractive; they confront their situation with a self-reflective form of dissociation, without, however, ceasing to harm themselves. Whether this constitutes a form of feminist resistance, or whether it instead reveals the consequences of neoliberal conditions, remains a matter of debate. Michelle, too, could be interpreted in this light: she allows herself to fall in love, even though the promise of equality inherent in that love is repeatedly undermined by social forces. See, for example, Teyah Miller, ‘Deranged, Dissociated and Loving it: My year of rest and relaxation and the rise of “unhinged women’s” literature’ in: Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences 17/1 (2025), pp. 6–27.

(2) One can therefore speak of a ‘class self-awareness’, loosely drawing on Jacques Rancière’s La Nuit des prolétaires (1981). Drawing on workers’ testimonies from the 1830s, Rancière demonstrates how workers appropriated the time and skills that society denied them: they read, wrote, composed poetry and developed conceptions of themselves that were not not defined by their their social position. This did not simply result in a uniform class identity. Rather, it revealed individual self-relationships that emerge from shared practices, without being reducible to a common experience. In this sense, ‘class self-awareness’ here does not denote political class consciousness, but rather a relationship to the self that is socially shaped yet cannot be derived from one’s class position.

(3) ‘The worst thing about shame is that you think you’re the only one feeling it’ or ‘Shame has become a way of life for me. In the end, I didn’t even notice it anymore; it was in my very body’, Annie Ernaux, *La Honte*, Paris: Gallimard 1997, p. 109; p. 131.

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