L'Affaire Book

In Diane Johnson's L'Affaire, Amy Hawkins, a smart, pretty Palo Alto girl who made herself a dot-com fortune, goes to France to get a sheen of sophistication and, perhaps, to have an affair that will ruffle her all-too-steady heart. Amy starts her quest in the French Alps in the town of Valméri, amid an assortment of aristocrats and ski enthusiasts.

When two of the hotel's guests, esteemed English publisher Adrian Venn and his much younger American wife, Kerry, are swept away by an avalanche, Adrian's children— young, old, legitimate, illegitimate—assemble in Valméri to protect their interests.

Amy, already suspect because she is American, steps in to assist, and unintentionally sets in motion a series of events that spotlight ancient national differences, customs, and laws. Filled with love, sex, death, and travel, L'Affaire is Diane Johnson at her very best in a comedy of contemporary manners played out between the sexes as they stumble over cultural barriers and slam into cultural stereotypes.

The New York Times

Don't imagine that L'Affaire is either a laugh-out-loud or get aroused-all-over kind of comedy or sex farce. Hardly. In the first place, the book moves very slowly -- you will learn a lot about cooking and the Napoleonic Code. Johnson divides her attention almost equally among a half-dozen characters, imbuing the plot with dramatic richness, but at the cost of intensity. This is a leisurely, almost old-fashioned novel of manners, really, and one needs to relax and accept that. There's no urgency of any sort -- sexual or narrative. In her prose, as in her tale, Johnson seems to be aiming for an elegant urbanity: She's never exactly witty, but she hopes to sound worldly-wise and often succeeds. — Michael Dirda