À vau-l'eau (English: With the Flow or Downstream or Drifting) is a novella by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published by Henry Kistmaeckers in Brussels on January 26, 1882.
The work — which has little in the way of plot — tells the story of Jean Folantin, a downtrodden Parisian civil service clerk whose quest for even a modicum of happiness or material comfort always ends in failure.
At the end of the novella, Folantin pessimistically resigns himself to give up hope and "go with the flow":"[H]e realised the futility of changing direction, the sterility of all enthusiasm and all effort.
It is the last book written in the author's early Naturalist style, with its unflinching depiction of sordid everyday reality, but several features point the way forward to the radical departure marked by Huysmans' next — and most famous — novel, À rebours.
(Quoted in the introduction to the Brown translation, p. xii) In her book, J.-K. Huysmans, Ruth Antosh writes:M. Folatin has been compared to other literary prototypes of alienation such as Sartre's Roquentin and Camus' Meursault, but he differs from them in that he seems to have deep-seated spiritual longings, though he rejects them as illogical, absurd.