French Exit
Patrick deWitt
[Bloomsbury Publishing]
Frances Price, ageing pillar of New York’s high-society and widow of Frank Price, a well-heeled lawyer for the tobacco industry, is determined to squander the fortune she’s inherited from her late husband. ‘You’re supposed to spend it all. That’s the object of the game.’ In the wake of self-imposed financial ruin, Frances elopes to Paris with Malcom, her man-child son, and Small Frank the cat.
Once in Paris, we learn that the cat is, after all, the reincarnation of Frank Price. And with that, French Exit performs a graceless pirouette into magical realism. deWitt then hastily assembles a cast that includes an eccentric widower, a private detective, a psychic medium and a wine merchant whose appearances offer little more than a glimmer of excitement, which quickly become suffused by the inescapable dullness of this book.
deWitt has skill in crafting sharp dialogue and precise prose, which helps this novel flow easily to its macabre denouement. But in attempting to balance an axis of bourgeois titillation and ennui, the novel has tipped head first into the latter.
The problem is that neither Frances nor Malcom are particularly invested in the struggles that beset them, and by extension, it’s hard to see why the reader should be. French Exit is styled as satire, but deWitt seems confused about whom or what his novel is attempting to satirise.
Words: Darragh Deighan-Gregory
