Le Divorce (William Abrahams Book) - Softcover

Johnson, Diane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452277337 ISBN 13: 9780452277335

Publisher: Penguin, 1998

Synopsis

Le Divorce is about Americans in Paris. Worse, Americans from Santa Barbara, California, in Paris. Also, French cultural superiority and American innocence. One sister's marriage. Another's illicit love. Infidelity. Family disapproval. A crime of passion. Perhaps murder. When California girl Isabel Walker, film school dropout, comes to visit her stepsister Roxy in Paris, she arrives on the day that Roxy's French husband, Charles-Henri de Persand, has left her for another woman. Roxy is distraught and pregnant. Charles-Henri's powerful and prestigious French family is counseling patience and acceptance: Isabel is soon caught up in the romantic intrigue and Roxy's parents are just as soon on their way to France to lend their daughter support. Add to all of this a contretemps over a painting belonging to the Walkers but given by Roxy as a wedding gift to her husband, which turns out to be extremely valuable. It is, as the French say, a situation. It is also the basis for a comedy of manners that looks with delicious wit at cultures and carnal desires in collision: at the absurd way in which love can lead us toward grand tragedy or, at least, toward jealous crimes of the heart.

About this title

Review

"Stylish... refreshing... a genuinely wise and humane novel."--The New York Times Book Review

"A modern collision of French and American mores begins in near farce but ends in tragedy in Johnson's bright, unsparing novel... Johnson is especially good at catching the class-bound, cool, utter self- assurance of the French upper classes, and the determinedly frank, aggressive innocence of their American counterparts... A shrewd, carefully detailed portrait of the ways in which Americans and the French continue to romanticize, denigrate, and misapprehend each other, contained in a well-paced, believably dramatic narrative."--Kirkus Reviews

"Social comedy at its best."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"One savors each page... If one were to cross Jane Austen and Henry James, the result would be Diane Johnson."--San Francisco Chronicle

From the Back Cover

Isabel Walker, a young, not-so-innocent American abroad, arrives in Paris to find that her sister's French husband ('the frog prince') has just walked out. While Isabel embarks on her own sentimental education - seduced by gourmet food, antiques, existentialism and an older man - her sister's marriage disintegrates into bitter Franco-American wrangles over money, titles and a mysterious painting. With a sharp tongue and an ironic eye for the foibles of the Parisian bourgeoisie, the French art world and American ex-patriots, Isabel is a collector of experience, even those she can't control.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0452277337
• ISBN 13: 9780452277335
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320