Customer Reviews

The House in Paris

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Magnificent! An altogether more mature novel than The Last September, leaner and richer at the same time. It is one of those books one wants simultaneously to speed through for the sake of the plot, and to linger over for the elegance and economy of the author's style and acuteness of her psychological insights. The Anchor edition serves it ill, I fear, by printing the revealing but otherwise excellent essay by A.S. Byatt as a preface rather than afterword, and by implying on the back jacket that the narrative is focused on the child Henrietta who, though brought to brilliant life, turns out to be a peripheral character. So one is at first confused by the shifts in viewpoint and authorial tone which are one of Bowen's strengths. And her subtlety in teasing out questions of personal identity between the competing powers of romance and convention is a delight from start to finish.

The House in Paris is about making choices.

It starts by introducing the reader to 11 year old Henrietta who passes through the House in Paris while on her way to visit her Grandmother in Mentone. We are later introduced to Leopold. He is a nine year old boy, going to visit his mother in the House in Paris, whom he has never met. The house belongs to Madame Fisher and her daughter Naomi.

The story then goes backwards, we find out how Leopold came to be. His mother had a tryst with Max while being engaged to someone else. Leopold's Father Max was Naomi's Fiance, whom he would have married had he not killed himself. I will not give the ending away, but the threads of the story come together and everyone has a connection to the house. Bowen's descriptive style of writing is evident throughout the chapters. I can guarantee readers that they won't want to put this book down. You wish the story wouldn't end.

This is my first experience reading Elizabeth Bowen. Her prose style is terrific- flowing, evocative, and deep. But rather than a comedy of manners, this is something of a *tragedy* of manners, as nearly all the female adult characters wallow in self pity and paralysis, often for fear of expressing their feelings to the people they (should) care most about. The callousness with which the children are treated is appalling as well. So while the art of description is magnificent, I can't help but be thankful I don't live in the stifling world Bowen has created.

This is a charming saga of young Henrietta, 11, on her trip through Paris, changing trains and sent to stay with a grandmother's friend. She finds herself in the middle of a classic family drama involving Leopold, another child also at the house who turns out to be the love-child of a yound woman who lived there during a Paris stay some years ago. As the family's pathetic attempt to cover this up unravels, Henrietta--who is at that Carol Gilligan moment of moral clarity before sexual motives unfold in her own experience--finds out for herself what motivates the adults in the House.

A surprising ending occurs, that some of you will like in this book primarily about women, and others will find a deus ex machina.

Having read more about Bowen than Bowen 's work, I decided to choose one for a break between the modern novels and the mysteries--a sorbet between courses. "House" came up mentioned most.
If I insisted that I must read the introduction first, I would never get to the novel: it is by A. S. Byatt who sees motivation in an ant walking and can sniff a whiff of prejudice at 100 yards. So I just plunged into the novel after a few pages of self-indulgent Byattizing.
The novel is built on a clever, skewed entry, through two nearly abandoned children, for the beginning chapters; then into the past, the lives of the forebears for one of them and the owners of the house in Paris.
This is the meat of the novel in which the sensibilities of English upper middle class life in the early part of the 20th century are explored against a background of an emotional and romantic triangle of three young people, sometimes a quartet as a parent plays a transitional role.
The characters are nearly full-bodied and full-blooded but function heavilly, totem-like in the web of social and cultural expectations, French and English, Jew and Gentile. St ill, there is genuine erotic tension on the page.
As one of the English parents is described, when opening a letter telling of her sister, Violet's death: "Mother hadn't wept in years, and she wasnt't about to now, especially in the library." Not far from Oscar Wilde and close to E.M. Forster.
The surrounding bookends of the children in Paris is not as full of Byatt's beliefs as she is: I found them a bit precocious but understandably so, and their fates less obvious than Byatt did. Of course she said she read the book several times--perhaps giving her the inside track on understanding some of the very tricky and abstruse descriptions of the character's feelings.
On the whole I like the book a lot and think I may check out another as I pursue the Henry James, Edith Warton oeuvre.

Jeanne Shutes chose this fine novel and four others to explore the theme of Parents and Children in her seminar, Self Awareness through Literature--the longest running book group known (>40 years). If you're interested in the other works of fiction she chose for this theme or would like other fine recommendations for your book club/group, go to the blog devoted to Jeanne's choices: personalgrowththroughfiction.blogspot.com.

The relations between the people in this book seem to be pretty strange to a modern reader. We have a complicated man (Max) who is fascinated by a considerably older lady (Mme Fisher) because he feels thoroughly understood by her. He sees rescue from this difficult relationship in a marriage with her daughter (Naomi), a loving and unselfish character who promises peace to him. Naomi's English friend Karen at the same time is attracted by Max, the two have a short affair, and after some time she gives birth to a boy (Leopold) in Germany in order to hide it from London society. Leopold is adopted by a childless couple.

Events in this book focus on one day in the Fishers' little house in Paris: Leopold, meanwhile 9 years old, is to see his mother for the first time in his life, but he is waiting in vain. Who does come in the end is not she, but her husband (Ray), with whom she has been married for some years...

This looks like a timeless subject-matter. But, at the same time, the actors seem to me very old-fashioned. The kids - (Leopold by chance meets an 11-year-old girl, Henrietta, in that house) - behave and talk like grown-ups, not only to each other, but to the grown-ups as well and, of course, they with them. The situation is in itself very dramatic, but the figures show a tendency to shun any drama which one would expect considering the nature of their relationships. And we hardly have any direct insight into the actors' minds. Instead, we have subtle and detailed descriptions of their surroundings which are supposed to mirror their feelings. Accordingly, Karen, the main character, in one passage criticizes the exactness of photography (then becoming fashionable) in favour of what she calls "indistinctness".

It is astonishing how Victorian British (and French) society still is in 1935 when the novel was written. There is not a trace of the political and human disaster that was to strike Europe and the world in the years to come, politics does not play any role. Maybe it was this self-centredness, this old-fashioned privacy that was typical of France and Great Britain in those years. Karen's parents in London are afraid of just one thing: change; and Karen gives her child away to lead a similar life like her parents: she wants to have normalcy, a convenient security in a marriage with an appropriate partner. At the same time, Naomi dedicates her life to others: she uncomplainingly gives up Max to Karen, and she sacrifices her life to her dominating mother by taking care of the old woman who has been lying sick in bed for many years meanwhile. And nobody ever calls anything into doubt.

As for the rating of this book: just three for the outmoded nature of the relationships and, weighing more heavily, four for the author's artistic method of creating atmospheres.

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Book Report: Henrietta and Leopold, two young people in transit, come together at the Paris house of Miss Fisher, a mousy spinster, and her formidable mother Madame Fisher. Henrietta is the granddaughter of an old frenemy of Madame's; Leopold has a less well-explained, more painful connection to the Fishers. He is there in the Fisher house to meet, for the first time, his mother. She gave him up for adoption because he was the product of a fling, a casual passion indulged with serious consequences. Many of them, in fact, and they continue to reverberate through the house in Paris...the lives of each person in the house start out the day without any portentous signs that, by the end of the day, there will be no one left standing unchanged.

My Review: Oh dear, oh dear, it's just no use. I can't like this book. It's sentimental, it's melodramatic, and I just didn't get off to a good start with it, since I detested Harriet the prim, smug little dumpling and abhorred wet, sniveling, spineless Miss Fisher.

The subtext of Harriet's grandmother's Sapphic affair with the invalid Madame Fisher, and the Big Reveal of Leopold's true connection to the Fishers, were not enough to make me change my low opinion of the book. Perhaps if I'd read it in 1935 I'd've been more enrapt. Here in 2011, not so much. I don't think Bowen was all that as a prose stylist, frankly, but I don't think the novel is her form. Her short fiction is far more limpidly written, and lucidly plotted. But still and all, the book isn't the worst I've ever read. I just wish it had been either shorter or longer. The middle section set in the past is awkwardly placed in the narrative, and the present-day bits don't really need it to make sense, so it should either be snipped out like an appendix or expanded to be a full narrative of its own.

Not recommended, but no travelers' advisories posted about it either. (Male readers take note, if while reading this book you feel an uncomfortable fullness in your abdomen, that's a uterus growing in response to your new, higher estrogen levels.)

Ms. Bowen comes to us from another era. Her skill in elaborating the details of that era is admirable. I am midway through this tale interweaving past and present so seamlessly that all characters seem close.

What a strange book. It moves far more through description and musings than direct action, which is sparse. Yet there is a rhythm and pacing that increase the allure of the characters and prods the narrative. The atmosphere enticed me. Throughout, even in times of sunshine or (briefly) lust, the overall feeling is murky and vaguely looming. Rich colors there are but muted. Bright light appears in sharp spurts.

The story itself, while certainly interesting and curious, is for me of secondary importance to the characters in it. Most powerful for me are the proprietoress of the Parisian House, a woman of great power and darkness; her emotionally stunted daughter, entangled in her strong sense of loyalty and ambushed by life's longings; and two children. These two - an 11 year old girl and a 9year old boy - entranced and bewitched me. They can be childlike but are wise and aware well beyond their years. Their sensibility and clarity are astonishing. Real? For my taste Bowen's art makes them so. (The day I finished reading the book, in a writing class I attend, I wrote a story that unwittingly evoked echoes of the boy.)

One way to describe how I feel about this book is to say it's like a richly painted canvas that has been overlaid by something thinly opaque. Call it a mist through which one apprehends the colors' intensities and the variousness of the hues. In the end, what sticks with me are the characters and the milieu. Henry Jamesian, I might say. This is reading for those who savor the evasive but definitely pungent scent and flavor of certain teas or coffees. And also, there is, at least for me, a melancholy sense of a Paris That Once Was - and maybe of a Time.