Patrick deWitt - French Exit

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Dull, self-regarding and mannered

I’m afraid I didn’t get on with French Exit at all. It seems to me to be a novel which thinks a great deal of itself but adds up to very little.

Frances, a wealthy, viciously bitchy, snobbish New York widow (Really? Again?) completely dominates her overweight, ineffectual son Malcolm, and destroys any other relationship he may develop (Really? Again?). Her financial profligacy means that she is reduced to the abject penury of her last few hundred thousand dollars, and her only (improbable) friend offers her use of a vacant apartment in Paris. This takes the best part of a hundred pages and although the book improves a bit in Paris, I simply couldn’t raise any interest in the story or its uninteresting and clichéd characters. We are told that Patrick deWitt is taking satirical jabs at his subjects, but to me it just felt like another uninteresting novel of New York’s rich – in whose lives the rest of the world ought to be hugely interested, apparently. Malcolm has a fiancé (well, any woman would fall in love with an obese, gauche, inarticulate man with some bizarre habits who is utterly dominated by his vile mother, wouldn’t she?) who at one point thinks, “The mother of the man she had accidentally fallen in love with did not approve of their union: this was so. But it was a common problem, wasn’t it? It was a trope.” Well, yes, it is, as is much of the rest of the book. The trouble is that none of it is much more than that.

Oh, it’s “beautifully written” of course – but in that self-conscious “beautiful writing” way that makes it often seem tediously arch to me and sometimes downright mannered; the use of “this was so” in the little extract above, or “Malcolm was yet in his hotel room,” (“yet”?) for example. It just jars on me, seeming out of place in context and thoroughly self-regarding.

French Exit has had some favourable reviews, but I found it to be dull, mannered and much of it was a struggle to get through. There have been some very fine novels involving New York’s rich; The Bonfire Of The Vanities, A Little Life and some others spring to mind, but this doesn’t have anywhere near their quality of satire or insight. I didn’t utterly hate it, but it was hard work and I really didn’t get much from it. I doubt whether I’ll bother with any more of Mr deWitt’s work.

(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)