Customer Reviews

Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die

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It's Sartre meets Kafka, loaded with sexual tension and unforgettable characters. Waldman writes a haunting book about a purgatory resting in a universe falling apart. The first fifty pages blew me away, and I was propelled thorugh the rest of the work. This book struck me on an intellectual level, and I found myself putting other things off so I could return to the world Waldman created. Beautiful prose, wonderfully flawed characters, and a cynical perspective on the universe as we don't know it. This book was not only a pleasure to read, but it was also a pleasure to finish. Even for those of us who'd only sojourned to Paris for breif episodes, Waldman's book brings that city to life without embarassing us for not knowing it as intimately as his characters do. As for whether or not good Americans actually would go to Paris after we die...one can only hope so.

Mark Kaplan is the writer of A Thousand Beauties. A Thousand Beauties

Although the saying is ascribed to a number of writers, most sources cite the phrase "good Americans go to Paris when they die" to Oscar Wilde's Woman of no Importance. For many Americans, particularly the well heeled, Paris might well be considered a kind of heaven. For others, the full irony and uncertainty of the notion of a "good American" might play out. So what if the saying were true? What if really good, that is, well behaved and nice, Americans ended up in a kind of Parisian heaven? What if a few bad ones got there too, by administrative mistake, and were held in a kind of purgatorial camp until a decision could be made on whether they were really good enough to be set free? It's an odd premise for a book, and few authors would be able to make it work. Howard Waldman manages it. Taking his cue from Beckett and Sartre, Waldman creates a novel that is blatantly absurd, and yet somehow, it not only manages to be entertaining, funny and rich, but also pithy. Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die maintains its consistency as a surreal fantasy, while never losing the realistic grounding in the fate of its characters. Taken metaphorically, the reader can relate to these people and the painful journey they take. The novel draws on everyman's worst fears, at the same time as it pokes holes in our beliefs. However surreal the story becomes, and however slapstick the humour at the crumbling Préfecture, the novel never strays too far from the believable progression of its characterisation. There is serious pathos in the fate of Gentille, the cleaner, and serious terror in the demands of the Prefect. The setting too is rich with Waldman's Paris, and the clever way the novel vacillates between the "real" world that the characters sometimes inhabit, and the misty dream world of memory, desire, and imagination.
There's a spare loveliness to Waldman's prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.

Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening