Le Divorce Book

One thing Le Divorce is definitely not: chick lit. There are abundant moments of spot-on satire and genuine poignance in this novel about American step-sisters Roxeanne and Isabel Walker adrift in Paris during the divorce of the former from her estranged French husband, Charles-Henri, who has himself fallen in love with a Yugoslavian woman. Le Divorce itself is set during the run-up to the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s, and a minor character is a local pundit actively engaged in criticizing France's role in the dispute.

Most of what engages in Le Divorce is in the Walker sisters' complicated and shifting relationship with Roxeanne's lively and sophisticated family of French in-laws, the Persands. The Persands' intimidating bourgeois perfection'the right clothes, the right cheeses, the right opinions'masks a cold and clannish condescension towards the non-French and especially the American. There is a substantial subplot regarding the fate, in the divorce, of a painting Roxeanne brought to Paris as a wedding gift to her husband, now believed to be a genuine De La Tour and of considerable value.

Roxeanne continues to love her adopted family and country blindly, even despite the alarming developments in the second act of the book, even as it is clear that her marriage with Charles-Henri has come to an end.

Le Divorce is a far from perfect novel. It is told in first-person from the view of the younger sister, Isabel, who learns of much of the drama second-hand because she is American and does not learn French until the end. I kept waiting for all the events of the second act of the book, some of them very exciting, to finally arouse Isabel from her southern California-bred apathy and make her feel something strongly for an extended period of time'sisterly indignation, crass gloating, even patriotism'but this never happens. Isabel never quite has the heart to make the case for herself'and by extension Americans'as someone to root for, and she portrays her sister as lovely but a little dim. Consequently, as I assume most divorcees feel, at the end I was not quite sure what it all had meant, but I was glad that it was over.