M Joseph £12.99 pp463
After Le Divorce and Le Mariage comes, perhaps inevitably, L’Affaire, the third of Diane Johnson’s sprightly comedies of manners, each of which capitalises on the cultural mayhem that ensues when naive, unworldly Americans attempt to breach the inviolable fortress of haut bourgeois French society. But if Henry James’s questing, blundering heroines are the obvious inspiration, the frame of reference is nothing if not self-consciously up to date. As this novel opens, against the backdrop of a devastating avalanche in an upmarket French Alpine resort, the Americans stand accused.
Popular, if uninformed opinion contends that the vibrations of US war planes, flying low over snowy terrain on their way towards a characteristically bellicose mission, might well have caused the catastrophe. This piece of far-fetched speculation astounds visiting Californian Amy Hawkins to the extent that she snorts with laughter at a polite soiree. Not merely an irresponsible race, then, the scandalised French company agrees, but also a monstrously tactless one.
It is a judgment that is particularly harsh on Amy, who is in the process of reinventing herself, guided by the ideals of mutual aid and social cooperation outlined by anarchist thinker Prince Kropotkin. Having made a mountain of money courtesy of the dotcom revolution, Amy is determined both to put her fortune to good use and to acquire the intellectual and social accomplishments in which she deems herself lacking. In this project, she imagines, she will be quietly supported by her new acquaintances.
Instead, she finds herself frequently despised and often fleeced, usually under the guise of kindness. She befriends a fellow American, Kip Canby, an orphaned teenager whose sister and brother-in-law, Adrian, have been grievously injured in the avalanche. She ends up paying for Adrian to be repatriated to Britain; when he dies en route, we sense that a lawsuit will not be far behind. Meanwhile, the Parisiennes who are so helpfully fitting out Amy’s city apartment are speedy in the matter of invoicing; the Austrian baron with whom she takes an unwise tumble into bed is largely interested in selling her a piece of prime Alpine real estate; even her innocent attendance at a talk about linen lands her with $9,000 of tablecloths and napkins.
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Against this cautionary tale of virtue assailed, great dramas and melodramas unfold. The wealthy Adrian proves to have been anything but virtuous; around his deathbed assemble the embittered children of his first marriage, a French love-child, Victoire, and her Tunisian husband Emile, a media-savvy intellectual with a nice line in casual adultery and any number of lawyers and business advisers.
The matter of where Adrian dies reveals itself to be critical: will it be in France, whose inheritance laws stringently favour an equal division of the spoils between all the children, even those conceived out of wedlock, or in England, where the testamentary wishes of the deceased prevail? And can any of the children truly triumph if they don’t embrace the ideals of mutual aid?
Enlivening this rather sombre subject material are, of course, numerous romantic and erotic liaisons, although it is hard to trace one particular “affaire”. Perhaps that is because Johnson has cleverly and amusingly hit on the fact that the real passion lies between two cultures who, amid choreographed displays of distrust and dislike, simply can’t live without one another.
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