Anna, a psychoanalyst in her late thirties in Paris, is in a
holding pattern after a miscarriage, while her husband, David, is working in
London. She meets a neighbor in her
twenties, Clementine, who is involved with a group that is pasting feminist
slogans all over the city, and the book basically treads water for 140
pages. Then a not-so-surprising
revelation stops Anna in her tracks, and we switch to a different couple, Henry
and Florence, who apparently occupied Anna’s apartment in the late 1960s. The novel then devolves into a bunch of
extra-marital affairs, inscrutable psychoanalytical theory, and lots of
untranslated French, although the author does translate the feminist slogans at
the end of the book. The middle section
just fizzles and is basically unfinished, I think, although I could have missed
something. After one particularly
maddening conversation between Anna and Clementine, Anna makes this observation
on page 371:
“There was still so much to talk about. I was left frustrated, as if there were soap
left on my skin and the hot water had gone.”
I love this analogy, but, really, a great book requires a
whole lot more than great writing.
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