LEFT BANK
by Kate Muir
Headline, £12.99; 377pp
OLIVIER MALIN IS A SEXY, stubbly media intellectual. His wife, Madison, is a beautiful American film star. They have a daughter, Sabine, and they live in a gorgeous apartment in Paris.
They’re chic, clever and unbelievably trendy. As this novel quickly makes clear, however, keeping up the appearance of such perfection is extremely hard work. Behind the gloss, Olivier is a serial screwer-around, Madison never eats and both are too deeply self-absorbed to take much notice of the child.
Kate Muir has lived in Paris (her newspaper dispatches from there were required reading a few years ago) and she describes this precious little segment of society with vivid observational wit.
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The beautiful surface of Madison is torn away, to reveal nothing but another surface — “she wondered if Hermès would one day name a bag after her. It was a serious ambition.”
Muir has a talent for conjuring up people and atmospheres in a few wry sentences. The Malins’ apartment, thinks the new nanny, “smelled of bad feng shui and old, old money, with perhaps a whiff of Dallas gilding thrown in”.
The nanny is a half-English girl named Anna Ayer — a rather bedraggled little gamine type, destined to trail joy, sorrow, lust and chaos into everyone’s lives. Anna is a likeable creature, with faint echoes of Amélie and Trilby and other gamine types who live on their wits in boho Paris — but with an edge of independence and humour.
Anna is not impressed by outward glamour. She sees that the Malins are obsessed with their public images to the point of implosion. Their daughter, meanwhile, has become a neglected performing monkey. The Chechen maid is hostile and cries constantly, the concierge a malign old crone with a passion for spying.
Most people would turn nosy with such a carnival passing before them — Olivier’s brief, narcissistic infidelities, the antics of various exiled Chechens, Madison’s sexless dalliances with various intellectual poseurs. Only Olivier himself is surprised when he finds himself falling for the nanny in a way that is disturbing and entirely new.
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Hearts break, egos come crashing down, and Muir’s gallop through the salons of the terminally pretentious is hugely entertaining. There’s plenty of warmth here, but served with a good helping of acerbity.