French Exit
Ratings17
Average rating3.6
Frances Price – tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature – is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Price’s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts.
Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit. One ocean voyage later, the curious trio land in their beloved Paris, the City of Light serving as a backdrop not for love or romance, but self destruction and economical ruin – to riotous effect. A number of singular characters serve to round out the cast: a bashful private investigator, an aimless psychic proposing a seance, and a doctor who makes house calls with his wine merchant in tow, to name a few.
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I could be romanticising things, but there's something special about picking a book based on it's cover, and enjoying it immensely. This is the second book of 2018 which has caught my eye based on the inclusion of a cat as one of the main characters. I was not disappointed. French Exit is full of wit and charm, but in a Lynchian way which is tremendously unsettling at times. The complexity of these characters kept me wanting to read and discover more about their inner worlds and perceptions of the human condition. For me this read wasn't a rollercoaster of sporadic events, but more a slow, evolving narrative of a vicious socialite of a widow, a despondent young man, and Small Frank the cat.
Note: this could easily be a Wes Anderson film. Fingers crossed.
A rich woman and her son have run through their fortunes and they head off to Paris to spend the last little bit of it. They become friends (if you can call it that) with a medium, a private investigator, a widow, and some vagrants, and they have to keep watch on their cat (the rich woman's dead husband) who is always trying to escape or kill himself.
It's a dark, dark comedy (think The Sisters Brothers) and it's probably just me, but it struck me as such a dark comedy that I couldn't accept the humor and I hated whatever sort of philosophical points (if any) that the author was making in the story (even if it was simply that there is none).
This novel was.....odd. I saw it described as a novel about people you don't actually want to know in real life, and that feels accurate. Humorous enough, and then halfway through there enters and entire subplot about a cat a reincarnation, and that's where I really lost the flow. But I finished it, so that has to mean something.
