Le fait est que comprendre les autres n’est pas la règle dans la vie

The expression Le fait est que comprendre les autres n’est pas la règle dans la vie is a sentence from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, cited at the threshold of a section titled “The Territory of Violence.” Its claim—that people repeatedly get one another wrong, and that error is part of being alive—serves as more than an epigraph. It prepares the reader for a narrative in which love, religious belonging, parental responsibility, and violence are all interpreted from partial and conflicting points of view.

The quotation and its framing

The passage quotes Roth’s observation that misunderstanding is not an exception to ordinary life but one of its recurring conditions: people misjudge others “again and again,” reflect, and then misjudge them once more. The statement ends by making error a sign of life. Placed before “The Territory of Violence,” it establishes a tension between the wish to know another person and the persistent failure of that knowledge. The phrase does not excuse harm; instead, its setting makes clear that misrecognition can carry serious consequences.

Intimacy under competing obligations

Adam Wizman’s history with Claire Farel gives the idea an intimate dimension. After returning from an unsuccessful period in Israel, Adam taught French at a Jewish school and lived within a tightly enclosed communal world. His wife, Valérie Berdah, became increasingly observant, took the name Sarah, changed how she dressed, and adopted stricter practices concerning food, Shabbat, and family purity. Their marriage had once been sustained by loyalty and mutual support, but Adam came to feel that he was living with a stranger. His attraction to Claire brought an intense sexual and emotional life, yet for a year he resisted leaving his family, torn between desire and the obligations he associated with a Jewish home and his daughters’ daily presence.

The conflict was not simply between a loveless marriage and a new romance. Adam understood departure as a possible breach with his community and with a history of Jewish survival, while staying meant continuing a life in which he felt alienated from himself. The January 2015 attacks deepened that pressure: for three days he remained at home with Sarah and their daughters, shutters closed, as fear and shared vulnerability bound the family together. He eventually told them he was leaving, but the decision did not dissolve the duties, guilt, and attachments that had made it difficult. The passage’s interest lies in this gap between a person’s inward experience and the meanings others may assign to his actions.

Love, family, and the limits of understanding

After the separation, Adam and Claire’s passion briefly narrowed their world to the two of them. They turned down invitations, withdrew from friends, and spent days together in their apartment. The intensity felt like happiness, but it also isolated them from the families and responsibilities that had previously shaped their lives. Their private sense of fulfilment therefore sat beside an uncomfortable recognition: they had become less present to people they had once considered central.

That withdrawal was disrupted when Mila Wizman arrived from Brooklyn with a suitcase. She could not bear the increasingly strict religious environment in which her mother was raising her. She described controls on her clothes and the gendered expectations reflected even in local shops, where toy stores sold kitchen sets for girls and prayer kits for boys. After her mother spoke of asking a rabbi to find her a husband once she turned eighteen, Mila returned to France to prepare for her baccalaureate as an independent candidate. Adam welcomed his daughter into his home; Claire, however, struggled with her constant presence and perceived an animosity between them. The episode makes misunderstanding tangible: Mila’s return was an act of escape from pressure, while Claire experienced the new household arrangement as an intrusion she could tolerate without turning it into affection.

Trauma and conflicting accounts

The later testimony about Mila’s life adds further layers to the expression. A psychologist described her as reserved and introverted, and said that during the alleged rape she appeared to have experienced a state of traumatic immobility that prevented her from defending herself. The psychologist also reported a severe anxiety-depressive syndrome, panic attacks, weight gain, and difficulty concentrating. Mila’s distress followed a long period of instability: the attack on her school in Toulouse, the failed move to Israel, her parents’ divorce, and her mother’s departure for Brooklyn.

The psychologist’s account also records Mila’s guilt about leaving her mother, who told her that the assault would not have happened had she stayed in the United States. Mila said she had loved her father’s new partner while also resenting her for breaking up the family. She disclosed an earlier unwanted touching by a friend’s father, which she had long denied, and said that after the rape she falsely claimed to have uterine cancer to keep boys at a distance. These details do not make her experience reducible to a single explanation; they show how memory, family blame, prior trauma, and a need for self-protection coexist in the account presented to the court.

Significance

The quotation’s central insight is enacted through these incompatible but consequential perspectives. Adam’s departure can be understood as an attempt to live honestly and as a painful rupture of family obligations; Claire’s welcome to Mila’s half-sister coexists with her difficulty accepting the girl’s presence; Mila’s move between households carries both a search for safety and the burden of accusations about what followed. The novel places no simple guarantee between closeness and comprehension. Its framing sentence instead asks readers to attend to how readily people mistake one another—and to the damage that can follow when a partial understanding hardens into certainty.