Le Mariage
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
"Like Jane Austen, Johnson delights in the worldly rituals surrounding courtship and marriage... she is a philosopher as much as a novelist."—The New Yorker
From the author of the acclaimed bestseller and National Book Award finalist Le Divorce, a sparkling comedy of manners once again set in the world of Americans in Paris
Anne-Sophie is a young Frenchwoman engaged to Tim Nolinger, an American journalist hot on the trail of a breaking story: The theft of a valuable illuminated manuscript from a private collection in New York, which may now be in the possession of a reclusive film director living on the outskirts of Paris. As Tim, Anne-Sophie, a pair of American antique dealers, and one amorous member of the local gentry converge on the director's chateau, the director's wife—a former actress—is accused of desecrating a national monument. Add to that a disappearing American; a hunting contretemps; a wrongful arrest; and murder, and you have this sexy, stylish, delight of a novel that celebrates the paradoxes of marriage and morality as they are perceived on both sides of the Atlantic. Filled with the author's pithy insights and hilarious asides, Le Mariage is Diane Johnson at her very best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even more knowing and perceptive than Le Divorce, Johnson's second novel about American expatriates in France is another wickedly clever comedy of manners. Her amused irony infuses this story of two romantic relationships. Good-natured Tim Nolinger, an easygoing journalist of mixed American and Belgian ancestry, is engaged to adorable Anne-Sophie d'Arget, who runs a boutique selling equestrian memorabilia in the Paris flea market. When Tim pursues a story about a stolen medieval manuscript called the Driad Apocalypse, their lives intersect with those of a former American film star, Clara Holly, and her husband, famous and reclusive director Serge Cray, who live in a ch teau in the suburbs of Paris. Peripheral characters include Anne-Sophie's mother, a cynical Parisienne novelist whose romance novels contain platitudinous advice about love that her daughter takes seriously; various members of the American community in Paris; the villagers of Etang-la-reine, who resent the rich property owners from the States and whose anger about the loss of their hunting rights triggers a plot against the Crays; two visitors from Clara's hometown in Oregon, and the members of a millennium cult there, who are pivotal in the drama of the purloined papers. What will be even more satisfying to Johnson's fans is the appearance of a character from Le Divorce, the dashing Antoine de Persand. In six degrees of separation, everybody is connected, yet the coincidences are artfully managed. Johnson's crisp manipulation of the engagingly convoluted plot is rooted in her central theme of French misconceptions about Americans, and vice versa. As exemplified by Holly and Cray, even those who share the same culture habitually fail to estimate the other accurately. Johnson's barbs are sophisticated and sharp, her amused irony is easily maintained, and her finesse at narrative is as fine tuned as her cultural sensitivity and her instincts about human behavior. As the novel ends, it is not surprising that le mariage of Anne-Sophie and Tim seems doomed by misunderstandings, but an adulterous liaison between two other characters conveys the mesmerizing passion of true love.
