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BY DIANE JOHNSON
DUTTON
FICTION
322 PAGES
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March 27, 2000 | In "Le Mariage," two American expats,
Clara Holly and Tim Nolinger, navigate
the trans-Atlantic divide. Clara is
married to Serge Cray, a reclusive
Polish director, and the couple live
together in a ritzy Parisian suburb
where Clara belongs to the "American
world that exists like a specialized
form in a complex ecosystem, dependent
on its hosts but apart from them." Tim,
a freelance journalist, is another type
of transplant altogether -- marginal,
fluid, opportunistic: "There are a
dozen, or dozens, of Americans like him
in Paris, clinging to the rather
precarious livelihoods they have managed
to score, for the pleasure of being
there or because they have burnt their
bridges and have no idea how to return." The antitheses of the innocents abroad in a Henry James novel, Johnson's Americans in Paris are steeped in the cultural syntax of both countries -- and powerless to do anything but cynically observe and snicker. At a wedding party for Tim and his Parisian fiancée, Anne-Sophie, Tim is both irritated that his future mother-in-law has hired a maid to dispense ice cubes (something she's heard Americans inexplicably adore) and embarrassed that his friends conform to stereotype by cloddishly ruining their kir champagnes with ice. Johnson is a beguiling writer, serving up catty observations with loopy good humor. The sharpest social critic in this novel is Anne-Sophie. Unlike the other French characters, who believe Americans are rich and lacking in subtlety, Anne-Sophie adores everything American, exclaiming happily about the tackiest aspects of our mass-market consumerism. In her exuberance (fast food, strip malls, Circuit City!) she points unerringly to all that's wrong with the United States. "Le Mariage" shares with "Le Divorce," Johnson's 1997 bestseller and a National Book Award finalist, a subject, a sensibility and a handful of characters. Each novel is a comedy of manners, but "Le Divorce" runs out of steam three-quarters of the way through. "Le Mariage," on the other hand, steadily gains momentum as seemingly minor threads recur, gaining interest with age. In one such thread, the Crays refuse to let hunters onto their property, defying a French law that permits your neighbors to shoot partridges and deer where they will. For the hunters, the Crays are the embodiment of American hypocrisy, representatives of a cavalierly murderous, gun-happy nation quibbling over a few dead pheasants. Clara and one of the hunters fall in love, the grudge match escalates and law and emotion collide more brutally with each fresh contact. "Le Mariage" is a slight novel but,
within the scope of its modest
ambitions, a near-perfect one. Johnson
is a masterly storyteller who can pull
off a storybook ending -- love, joy, a
trip down the aisle -- without making us
gag. "To look for happiness was like
looking at the sun during an eclipse.
Not only did the sun disappear, but you
burned your eyeballs too. Yet here,
strangely, unsought for, was happiness."
The true marriage, of course, is the one
of two cultures, poorly matched and
prone to wild misunderstandings, yet
ineluctably drawn together in a
passionate and lasting embrace.
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