[Momo, the narrator of La Vie devant soi,] is one of a group of children abandoned by Parisian prostitutes and brought up by a former Jewish streetwalker, Madame Rosa…. In trying to discover what it means to be a fourteen-year-old Arab in this ghetto, Momo provides an intriguing autobiography of French subcultures as well as of his own confrontations with them.

Momo's street idiom portrays the life-styles of the Jews, Arabs, Africans, Algerians, and other French immigrants of this unique ghetto in the stark reality of their shabby existence. But he does not give us stereotypes. Momo observes the mutual cooperation and cohabitation of this community of heterogeneous pimps, transvestites, prostitutes, and other pariahs of French society with a sensitivity to the individuality of the people involved. His witness to the genuine warmth and bitterness among marginal social types suggests this text as a twentieth-century version of Hugo's...