Customer Reviews

Somewhere in France

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

 

 

In an earlier novel, "Unknown Soldiers," Gardiner focused on what was happening in an American community while World War II was raging. In "Somewhere in France," he goes further, exploring the dynamics both of homefront and battle front through the tumultuous changes in the lives of the members of one family during World War I. The vivid, sometimes bizarre, events of the story held my attention, but the book's power lay in the way I kept mulling it over after I had read it. The author has thought deeply about the strengths and weaknesses in family bonds, and the influence of shared family values, and readers are likely to gain new perspective on these issues from this readable story.

Allow yourself to fall under the spell of Gardiner's opening pages and you won't leave until the story is done. The book is wise, at times shocking, never less than elegant ... compelling storytelling, compulsively readable.

The main characters in this book are such unpleasant people you wouldn't want to spend even five minutes with them, at least initially, so the fact that you get involved in the story at all is a huge testament to the author's writing skill! The fact that you eventually love the book and root for the characters' happiness makes him a miracle maker.

William Lloyd is a 44-year-old doctor, whose adolescence is laid bare in the letters he has written to his family while a teenager at St. Mark's School. By turns smarmy, arrogant, and devious, he is both subtly and overtly manipulative, ingratiating himself with whoever is in power, wherever he is, both as a teenager and as an adult. Humility and respect for others are virtues incompatible with his belief in his own moral and social superiority. His children are even worse! When William meets Jeanne Prie, a hospital worker in France, where he has been sent during World War I, he finds himself exposed to values and experiences totally foreign to him and begins the long, tortuous process of self-enlightenment, a road he negotiates with the enormous difficulties of the self-blind.

It is a testament to the author's vision and immense writing skill that at some point in the first half of the novel he leads us to the slow realization that Lloyd is not a uniquely unpleasant man, that he is the aristocratic product of an age which does not question the morality of social class or its values and behaviors, and we slowly realize that much of the barbarity of World War I itself is a direct result of this same societal blindness. This is more than a brilliant book with an exciting story. It is a realistic recreation of people with the values and mores of the age behaving "normally" under what become extraordinary circumstances.

The more I learn about the history of the twentieth-century, the more intrigued I am by WWI and the worldwide impact of the 1918 flu epidemic. With these interests, Somewhere in France sounded like an ideal read; and, in many respects, it was. Although the scenes of life on the American homefront and in the French hospital are very graphic, they are well-written and carry a tone of historical accuracy. The characterizations of the doctor and his family were well-developed and felt plausible. By contrast, the depiction of the French nurse was too sketchy to create any empathy from this reader. Between episodes as a manipulative scientist, uncannonized saint, and egocentric homewrecker, I began to resent her appearances in the text. This was complicated by the almost flippant way the doctor's family was portrayed after his final departure from their lives. Divorce at that time produced far greater consequences on upper-class families than the author allowed, thereby undermining his historical authenticity. The plot collapses and the final six pages reflect a complete disintegration, leaving more questions than answers. Although the author's footnote indicates a motivation to somehow explain the parallel actions of his own grandfather, this book's inability to convey the essence of the "other woman" and final plot complexities keep it from being a timeless WWI masterpiece.

Somewhere in France, Gardiner

It was the World War, the Great War. U.S. Army Major William Lloyd, M.D., had given up his practice at Roosevelt Hospital in New York to do something important for his country. Now he was somewhere in France. That somewhere, which the mail censors faithfully blotted from his letters to a dysfunctional family back home, was Chaumont.

A passage: "On October 3, 1917, a few days before his American medical team arrived to join him in Chaumont, Major Lloyd entered the Hotel Rive Haute for a final inspection. As a roving officer of the Chief Surgeon's staff, he had requisitioned the building for Base Hospital 15 of the Allied Expeditionary Force. A few French casualties were temporarily in beds on the floor, attended by a single French doctor."

Base Hospital 15 would soon be doing a thriving business.

Another passage: "The first person Dr. Lloyd encountered was one on hands-and-knees, scrubbing the floor. "There was a powerful smell of ammonia around him. It was perfume to the Major's sense of hygiene. This, and the picture of the poor man at his thankless task, turned the officer's mood, filled him with pity and self-reproach. Good enough, he thought, the man must come with the building. I'll make a place for him in the table of organization. `Well done. What's your name.' "

HER name was Jeanne Prie (when she wasn't Lucienne de Crouen) -- nurse. Dr. Lloyd made a place for her in his table of organization. She had chosen Jeanne after Jeanne d'Arc (no doubt out of admiration, not imitation, for Joan of Arc is inimitable). She proved to be a credible stand-in for Madame Marie Curie, working tirelessly to concoct vaccines against infections of unknown origins. Unintentionally, Lloyd would secure for himself a place in her life long after his table of organization ceased to exist.

An Irishman whose name won't come to mind said unlike a bird we can't, in a story, be in two places at the same time. He should read this, for we often find ourselves with one foot in Chaumont and the other in the family estate of Moriches on Long Island, and that accounts for some of the magic of this story. One element of our magic carpet is Gardiner's craftsmanlike way of putting us observers in one place then the other without our being conscious of our having been transported.

Another element is a flow of newsy letters between Lloyd and his wife, instinctively censored by both as they put the best faces on their theaters of operations. Dr. Lloyd's present persona is buttressed by a larger than life view of William Lloyd the schoolboy, resurrected by candid letters to his parents way back when.

Gardiner's writing style is as compelling as the story itself - something we hope (and deserve) to find often but don't, especially in current best-sellers. Part of his magic may be attributable to his having had a splendid editor. He offers a prefatory note of thanks to Knopf editor Ann Close, recognized as one of the best around today.

While reading this story I wondered how Gardiner came to conceive it. Lo and behold, at the back of the book is his answer to that very question. Very touching, too.

I finished this book in a foul mood, which I eventually managed to atribute to a simple cause: lack of passion. The book simply--to my mind--has no life. The characters (with a few minor exceptions) seem trapped by expectations. I grant you it's set in a repressed time, but still, I was hoping, until the bitter end, for a flash of life. Somewhere.

And I am not a romance reader, so that's not what I was looking for.... Just a small spark of life.

A pretty disappointing read, in my view.

I'd have to give this book a fat C (satisfactory). It's lucky to get that when I barely cared for the characters at all. It's a simple story based on the author finding letters that belonged to his grandfather. It was a nice concept for a book but the story really moved too slowly. Here it is World War I with a doctor separated from his New York family while in France. The doctors' letter writing clearly renders his loving infatuation with a young nurse while dealing with medical antidotes. The writing seemed relatively good but the story lacked intrigue and interest. It's a mix between a family surviving without the head of household and a 'want to be' love story. Why I chose to finish the book is beyond me, but I did underscore some beautifully written excerpts such as:
A true intellect rushes on with what it has to say without stopping to admire its penmanship. (I think the author stopped to admire his handwriting--that's for sure!)
I don't think I'll ever marry. ...a book can be far better company than a silent man or an irritable woman. Why not spend your life with books? (not this book!)
Stop this quarreling. There is too much to be grateful for.
(Okay, the author made an effort.)
His pages were still secrets locked in a desk. (more secrets and development needed to be unlocked for this book to work)
If the city's grid was a chessboard, she moved across it with the queen's whim and freedom, a celebrity denying a destination, as if bound to keep moving for her own security. (Hmmm...could the writer of this book moved along too quickly with whim & freedom as well?)
Without rubbing their noses in his contentment, he was eager to share experience. (There were a few touching moments but it was hard to feel emotion when I never embraced the characters to begin with.)