I am, by this point, a deWitt fan girl. He is one of my few auto-buy authors who are currently still alive and writing. When i found this book available on NetGalley I hit request faster than you can blink. When my request was approved i started reading immediately.

Every deWitt novel is different and new. Observations on life from a barman, crime- and money-focused brothers in a western, love and friendship set in a bizarre fairytale. This time it’s family and loss amongst a comedy of manners. And i loved it.

Our main character is Frances, a rich and hard woman, she has few friends but is generous and affable with unlikely folk. She lives with her son, Malcolm, who often comes across as simple and easily led, but who grew on me immensely throughout the book. They are, at various and increasingly frequent points, joined by an array of characters. I couldn’t help but like them all, really. Joan, Frances’ oldest and dearest friend; Susan, Malcolm’s sweet and patient fiancée; as well as Madeline, Mme Reynard, Julian, and of course Small Frank.

After blowing through all of their money, Frances and Malcolm are faced with selling all their worldly possessions and fleeing to France… where Frances is set on spending the last of their money quick sharpish. There isn’t a huge amount of plot to speak of (in fact i’ve just spoken of it), but it is the characters and that carry the book. Their interactions, their thoughts and feelings, and what they choose to share (and hide) with those around them. I loved how unabashedly these characters just are. They might not talk to each other about important things or share much about themselves, but they are always being themselves.

The writing is wonderful and hilarious. I laughed aloud enough to feel satisfaction and joy, and had to share a few choice extracts with my partner (who humoured me kindly). This might be my favourite deWitt novel yet. Maybe. Just thinking about certain parts and quotes now have me huffing more laughter. But for all its humour, there was depth and emotion to the story and the characters. They throw money around and live it up, but it’s very much at the expense of thinking about things and allowing themselves to feel too much.

I’m certain i can’t recommend this book enough, and deWitt certainly can’t write his next book quick enough.

An exploration of what happens to a beautiful charismatic woman in later life, and possibly her coming of age. Spare clear writing and dark humour. Set in Paris. As with all Patrick deWitt's books, French Exit ended too soon. Not with a cliffhanger, but with me wanting more. With a few strokes, deWitt colours in spiky and strange but very attractive characters. If I say a talking cat appears, don't run away, there is nothing twee in this book about Frances, her son Malcolm and their friends. A must read because there isn't much like this!

Frances, her cat and her adult son, Malcolm, head to Paris. The cat is the reincarnation of her dead husband.

French Exit is a glorious tragic farce. Frances Price is an Upper East Side force of nature, feared and admired in equal measure. Her skills are withering looks, cutting comments and burning through money. She is an American version of Princess Margaret. Frances keeps her useless son Malcolm close to her, and sabotages any chance of love he has. Joan is her only friend.
One day she is told all the money has run out. Frances and Malcolm decamp to Paris, to live within straightened circumstances in Joan's small flat. Patrick de Witt introduces an array of colourful characters into the flat until it becomes a sort of menagerie. The book becomes strager and funnier as it goes along until it reaches a dizzying climax. Well worth four stars.

This is an interesting novel. Frances is a rich eccentric New Yorker but when her money runs out, she moves to Paris with her grown up son Malcolm. Malcolm is also quite eccentric. I can't say I liked either Frances or Malcolm but it did find their relationship somewhat endearing - two emotionally stunted people who genuinely loved each other. I'm not sure if I missed something vital in the plotline but the story is a bit vague and the ending was a little anticlimactic. There were quite a few loose ends but on reflection, I think these don't matter as they fit in with the vague plotline. It's certainly a readable book and is quite short. I don't think I wasted my time reading it and I think this author will improve.

I loved this book, with its truly awful central characters that are so horrible and detached from real-life that you can’t help but, well, liking them!

Frances Price lives in New York with her son, Malcolm, and her cat Small Frank, named after her late husband Franklin. Oh, and Frances is of the opinion the cat houses the spirit of her dead husband. Oh, and she is flat broke, having blown her husband’s fortune. They decamp to Paris – via a surreal sea voyage - and the story just gets more and more complicated, and more and more farcical. There is a private investigator, a medium, a wine merchant, and a fellow ex-pat who inveigles her way into their life. Throw in Malcolm’s ex-fiancée Susan and her new fiancé Tom, and Joan, Frances’s old friend from New York, and you get a sense of the chaos and ever-increasing oddness of the plot (which I won’t go into here!). Suffice to say I did laugh out loud on several occasions.

Never having read any of deWitt’s previous novels I was unsure what to expect. It reminded me a little of the satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh with their scathing look at the cruelty and disdain of the rich, living a life of such detachment from the real world that they become caricatures. At one point, as police and immigrants riot in a nearby park, the whole party watch from the apartment casually sipping cocktails and treating it as TV entertainment. This is Waugh with venom.

But, as we learn more about the back histories of both Frances and Malcolm throughout the book, I couldn’t help but feel there was a humanity there underneath the surface. It becomes a book about family, about the damaged relationship between mother and son, and about finding peace. The ending is shocking in its way, but cathartic. ‘Now came strangenesses’ the narrative tells us towards the end. Indeed, but this tragedy of manners illustrates how we are shaped by our past and how we long to escape its hold. Wonderful stuff.

utterly delightful - the engaging and hilarious mother and son - for whom all fall in love! despite high handed manners and dotty reactions - after losing it all, they descend on an unsuspecting Paris and Frances, the indomitable mater, takes on seeking out the riches she lost after spending it all as widow to a relentless lawyer. Malcolm has a totally obsessed fiance - despite his close attachment to his mother who sneers at Susan. she is constantly on the verge of giving up but then sight of his voluminous body and awkward manners, ensnares her again and again. in paris it all comes together - the cat goes missing , a medium met on the cruise over turns up to save the day, and Frances' experiences some home truths - the group tell tales to each other, and the son gets a new chance at life once his mother has taken action. sad and yet wonderfully entertaining. acerbic wit but heart felt times too ... really recommendable - to be read in one sitting - as I did!

Sixtysomething Manhattan socialite Frances, her 32 year old son Malcolm and their cat, Small Frank, live a carefree life – until the family fortune runs out. Suddenly homeless, they head to Paris, France, to stay in a wealthy friend’s apartment where destiny awaits…

Oui - Patrick deWitt’s latest novel French Exit is tres bonne! It’s this pleasingly bizarre comedy about nutters that reads uncannily like a Wes Anderson movie by way of Arrested Development.

I read the book with Lucille and Buster Bluth in my mind as Frances and Malcolm as their characters/relationship are almost identical: Frances, the domineering, constantly-squiffy elderly mother used to a life of pampered luxury, and Malcolm, the hapless, coddled thirtysomething man-child, bumbling through life, content to be steered by his ma (though he doesn’t have Buster’s hook-hand!).

And even though you could call French Exit derivative in that regard, deWitt’s execution is so perfect and so much fun to read, I couldn’t care less – not least as I love Wes Anderson and Arrested Development!

The novel would have benefitted from an overarching plot as its directionlessness allowed for a lot of stagnation once all the characters had congregated in the Parisian apartment and the story noticeably slowed at a time – the final act – when it should be building to a climax. That and the surprisingly grim and underwhelming finale were the only aspects I disliked. I suppose the ending lives up to the title but it still felt like an awkward fit tonally for an otherwise breezy read. I was just hoping for something more imaginative and subversive.

Otherwise, there’s nothing but good stuff to revel in! The cast are a delightfully eccentric bunch, the dialogue is consistently funny, almost every scene is amusing, and the overall effect is a charming and playful read. I also loved the well-calculated element of fantasy deWitt introduced into the story with the reveal of Small Frank’s secret, displaying a refreshingly carefree lack of confinement to genre, and his subtle but pointed refusal to explain it thereafter.

French Exit is a barrel of ohoho fun. Anyone who likes Wes Anderson’s movies, Arrested Development, PG Wodehouse’s novels, and A Confederacy of Dunces, will have a blast with this one. And despite those comparisons, Patrick deWitt has crafted a beast distinctly his own. He’s done it again – this guy can’t write a bad book!

'French Exit' (aka ‘ghosting’) is apparently a term meaning to leave a social situation without saying goodbye to the hosts - a particularly apt title for this novel with the New Yorker socialite protagonists secretly decamping to Paris after being declared bankrupt.
Although I'm a big fan of black comedy, I found this rather a difficult one to fully engage with until I got into the right frame of mind. The dysfunctional mother and son relationship reminded me of O’Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, and the stylish prose is also reminiscent of Oscar Wilde. It's an old-fashioned tragi-comedy of manners and social commentary with an absurdist plot and a cast of stock farce dramatis personae, ripe for satire. I will certainly be reading more of this author’s novels.

French Exit is deWitt’s fourth novel and I have read them all. He is best known for his Booker nominated “The Sisters Brothers”, scheduled for release as a movie in September 2018 (I’m looking forward to that!). But Ablutions and Undermajordomo Minor also share the dark comedy that is a trademark of deWitt’s writing. This novel is billed as a “comedy of manners”. It is important to note that as you head into the story. “Comedy of manners” is a defined literary form of satire that targets contemporary society and societal norms. To do this, a comedy of manners often uses stock characters and often sacrifices plot (normally it is about a scandal of some kind) in deference to witty dialogue and social commentary.

It helps to go into DeWitt’s new novel knowing this because the plot is absurd. If you read the book on the understanding that this is deliberate, it works. But don’t try to take it seriously. I laughed a lot while reading this book. You will too, I think, if you found The Sisters Brothers funny.

A lot of the humour is deadpan:

“She said, ‘I told Don I had to run to Paris because I thought you were going to kill yourself. He was fiddling with the television remote and he told me, ‘Tell her hello if you get there in time.’’”

Some of it is pure farce, such as when Malcolm leaps into bed with a woman he meets on the boat and “…peeling of his socks, he said, ‘I won’t be needing these!’”

Frances Price is a 65-year-old widow. Scandal has followed her since she found her husband dead on their floor and left him there without telling anyone while she headed off on a skiing trip. Before his death, her husband was fabulously wealthy and Frances has never known anything other than wealth. That is until her profligacy uses up all the money her husband left and she discovers, despite repeated warnings from her advisor, that she is broke. She and her son, Malcolm, head to a friend’s apartment in Paris with the cash they can pull together by selling their possessions. And with Small Frank, a cat who plays an increasingly important part in an increasingly bizarre plot.

And Frances has a plan.

A chapter late in the book starts with the sentence “Now came strangeness”, which leaves the reader thinking “What do you mean ‘now’? What about all the strangeness so far? What’s going to happen ‘now’?”

I won’t spoil the book by revealing the plot, but I will say that you need to suspend disbelief because it heads off into left field and doesn’t show much sign of coming home. Until the very sad ending. You see, right at the start, a character says of Frances “He knew he should dislike this woman, but he didn’t or he couldn’t”, and that is the reader’s experience, too. She’s arrogant, she’s a snob, she manipulates people. But you can’t help yourself starting to like her and this means the ending packs a punch.

In a nod towards the themes of the current (2018) Man Booker long list, there’s an undercurrent of racial tension. This is observed by the “upper classes” who are our main characters - significantly, they look down on the immigrants from their apartment. There’s not a lot of this, but some murmurings that culminate in the police putting down a riot amongst immigrants in a Paris park:

“Riot police came pouring into the park. Abnormally large and it battlefield armor, they went about their violence with authority and vigor, certain of them with an apparent pleasure. The moved through the park knocking down the immigrants one after the other; a tap on the skull and on to the next.”

One of the immigrants tries to fight back and is beaten unconscious. Later in the book, Frances is down there giving him money. Is she being philanthropic or is this part of her grand plan? Perhaps it is a bit of both.

If you liked The Sisters Brothers, I would recommend this. It perhaps isn’t as good, but it is still an entertaining read. I haven’t even mentioned the bizarre way Small Frank gets involved with the plot!

3.5 stars, rounded up because it was fun.

My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for a review copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of French Exit. It’s billed as a ‘comedy / tragedy of manners’, and is framed around an upper / high society widow and her rather pathetic son. From the description I’d expected something gently witty, rather than uproarious, but it rarely raised a smile from me. There are absurdist touches, which will appeal more to others than it did for me.
I engaged more strongly with the tragic elements, which drive the narrative with just enough sense of mystery.
The story, such as it is, is interesting enough, and it’s a quick read, but decidedly less enjoyable or interesting than The Sisters Brothers.

I am a big fan of Patrick deWitt's novels Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor, and although French Exit is delightfully full of deWitt's trademark eccentric characters, witty dialogue and gothic atmosphere, I felt a little let down by the plot. Still an enjoyable read.