Doria, the 15-year-old surnameless heroine of Faļza Gučne's short and sharp first novel, isn't instantly likeable. In fact, she's the personification of all the things we vilify in teenagers: she is contrary, deliberately narky, confused, and disgusted by the hypocrisy of adults. She's a hedgehog in human form, a prickly character whose barbs are either defensively on display or who, when prodded, withdraws into an impervious shell.
There are many reasons, besides hormones, why Doria is like this. For a start, she is a girl, which is so catastrophic to the self-esteem of her dad, "Mr How-Big-Is-My-Beard", that he has returned to his native Morocco in the hope of siring a son. Second, her dad won't send back a scrap of his Renault pension, forcing Doria to attend school wearing charity-shop cast-offs and to eat tinned tuna every day for lunch. Worst of all, she lives on one of the vast high-rise estates that form a concrete ring around Paris. In this place, hope is sapped from birth onwards by an awareness, reinforced by each day of hard-scrabble experience, that there is a good and fulfilling life to be had anywhere but here.
The only chinks of light in this unremitting greyness are Doria's weekly meetings with a psychiatrist, Mrs Burlaud. Initially, even she doesn't escape Doria's scattergun scorn - "I bet [she] goes on a skiing holiday every winter, and I bet she never does any skiing either" - but the very novelty of being listened to is enough to prod the teenage hedgehog into grudging appreciation of her efforts.
That the story takes place entire-ly on this cheerless estate and yet manages never to be depressing is a testament to Gučne's lightness of heart and belief not only in her own potential, but in that of anyone stuck in a place that stifles it. Except for the fact that her parents are from Algeria and her father stuck around, Gučne is describing her own life as much as her fictional character's.
Because Gučne grew up on just the kind of peripheral estate that has gone up in riotous flames in the past six months, the 20-year-old author has been required to give chapter and verse to French news-papers on the possible causes of such unrest and what can be done to help. After the novel - originally called Kiffe kiffe demain, which roughly translates as "More of the Same Tomorrow" - sold 70,000 copies in France, she was even asked to become an ambassador for "positive discrimination": a request that rather missed the point, and to which she gave short shrift. You can just imagine Doria responding with a derisive "Pffft" and a well-deserved kick in Sarkozy's gonads.
Then again, Doria's not the violent type. On the cruelly named Paradise Estate, apathy and resignation rule more than brute force. Even the young men, infantilised by the early experience of prison and emasculated by the unemployment that results, would rather smoke weed in the stairwells than beat each other up. Many other details ring true: the well-meaning social workers who fail to identify their clients as humans with feelings; the dorky A-grade student who returns after the summer break with a putative beard and an off-putting swagger; Doria's consignment to hairdressing school for no other reason than that it's what girls on council estates are expected to do.
Gučne's writing voice brims over with Doria's abrasive but bruised personality; the result is that you want to reach inside the book and tell her everything is going to be all right. But it's also refreshing that at no point does she force a positive- thinking message down the throats of her readers - who, if they're reading the children's edition that is being published simultaneously with one for adults, will be at an age when being positive is something you laugh at rather than aspire to. Doria's murky outlook on life changes when things begin to go well for her and her mum, not in advance of them going well, which is how it tends to happen in real life.
What Gučne is trying to tell us, through Doria, is that she's no one special. She's simply a young working-class woman who, by some quirk of fate, has been given a chance to add her voice to an otherwise fairly homogeneous writerly babble. Just Like Tomorrow is a book that ought to make us realise that keeping great swathes of the population in giant concrete holding pens, cut off from the city, the economy and decent schools, does a nation's culture no good at all.
Lynsey Hanley's history of the council estate, Estates, is published by Granta Books next January
