Le Divorce by Diane Johnson

I think my expectations for this book were too high. It seemed so promising, a comic tale of a young American in Paris and the hilarious culture clash as she watches her sister go through a French divorce. The truth is that I started to get jumpy about the sweeping generalizations (French are like this; Americans are like that) very early on. Some side effect of being a sociologist's child, maybe, but also an inner protest against stereotypes. Also, being a European immigrant child who lives in French Canada, well, my giggles over the French are different than those of a Californian.

I did have fun spotting moments of Franglais in the text - people were "installing" themselves into seats in cafes, and my favourite "Outside in the Place Maubert, all was normality". It's like, where are the editors please? Diane Johnson spends half her time in Paris, so she can be forgiven but someone else might have noticed. So while it was evocative to read about a young woman's attempts to dissolve into the landscape, her affair with a senior citizen was a hard sell. And the gun shooting ending rattled on me like a Hollywood movie, as if someone had dashed into the book and said "but we need more action! Where is the plot?". For some reason I didn't find all that much to be funny either, nothing like the chuckles inspired by Helen Fielding or anything like that. The theories of them against us, French vs. American, would be much more amusing on Ca Se Discute, or perhaps over a long drunken Sunday brunch than they are in print in a big fat novel. IMHO

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