From cat Small Frank: “elderly to the point of decrepitude” to the unlikable Frances and her smothered son, this was a delightful read.

This book was a delight to read. I could see it as a play and it was wholly satisfyingly absurd. A delight!

French Exit by Patrick deWitt

Publication date: August 28th, 2018. Publisher: House of Anansi.

“’Do you ever feel,’ she asked, ‘that adulthood was thrust upon you at too young an age, and that you are still essentially a child mimicking the behaviours of the adults all around you in hopes they won't discover the meager contents of your heart?’”

I was a huge fan of Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor so I was extremely excited about this book. The summary made it sound like it would be right up my alley. French Exit is about a wealthy woman, Frances Price, who goes broke and moves with her son, Macolm, to her friend’s apartment in Paris. Unfortunately, I found the characters too unlikeable to enjoy the story. Malcolm is entitled and treats his girlfriend Susan with indifference and Frances herself can be nasty, and at times, spiteful.

“’Well, for one,’ said Frances, ‘that's an extremely shitty thing to say to me. Two, the glamour passed a long time ago, and toy know very well that it did. And third, three, yes, my life is riddled by clichs, but do you know what a cliche is? It's a story so fine and thrilling that it's grown old in its hopeful retelling.’”

However, it must be said that I may not have been in the right frame of mind to appreciate this book. I read it as my mother was dying and should probably have chosen something a bit more uplifting. I will say in its defense that this book is incredibly well-written. Patrick deWitt is a true talent. I just did not enjoy it in the way I was hoping to. I refuse to give it anything less than a B-, but I think you have to be in the right mood for this book.

Grade B-

Thank you to Net Galley and House of Anansi for an Advanced Reader Copy of this book.

It’s autumn in Canada, and that can only mean one thing: awards season! Yes, it’s time for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and on tap is a novel that was one of five that made the Giller’s shortlist: Patrick deWitt’s French Exit. As luck would have it, two earlier books I reviewed this year also made the list: Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes. So having read three of the five books that made the shortlist means I can make (or attempt to make) an overarching comment about the quality of books up for the prize this year: It’s a pretty mediocre bunch. I wasn’t impressed with either of Heti’s or Lim’s books, finding them both just passable, and it is with a sad heart that I have to add French Exit to the mix. It’s unfortunate because I really loved deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (now a movie that I desperately want to see) but reading French Exit was sort of like watching an author coast on autopilot. There’s not much point to this book’s existence, and that’s me being charitable.

French Exit features a mother and son duo named Frances and Malcolm who are an upper-crust pair who find themselves suddenly insolvent and wind up moving from their New York City digs for Paris for no real reason. (Get it? Frances and France? Har de har har.) Accompanying them is their cat, named Small Frank, who apparently is Frances’ late husband reincarnated. Also accompanying them is a gaggle of characters, including a fortune-teller, a private investigator, a nosy neighbour, Malcolm’s ex-fiancée and anyone else the author mentions in the first third of the book as a minor character. The plot? Virtually non-existent. The characters sit around and wax philosophically, until the book ends. That’s it, that’s all – again, readers might be asking themselves, what’s the point of all of this? And how does this book get nominated for a major Canadian writing award?

I don’t know the answer to that last question – were most of the 104 books submitted for nomination by publishers this year truly awful? – but I can say that the book is witty. At no point will you break out in uproarious laughter, but a smile may cross your face now and then. However, beyond that, there’s not much to recommend. The main characters are snobby and throw away money, making it hard to care for their plight. The secondary characters don’t add much – for instance, Malcolm’s fiancée reappears in Paris but never does the book suggest that they’re getting back together, which is a major plot thread left dangling. What’s more, the book is more interested in telling backstories about how troubled the main characters were coming of age without them adding much to the narrative. Which leads one to wonder what exactly is deWitt trying to say? Is a story about Frances setting fire to her home as a young girl meant to explain away why she is so frivolous with finances? Is the story about how Frances immediately went on a ski vacation when she discovered her dead husband without contacting the authorities meant to show how callous she is? You know, there’s a writing rule called show don’t tell, which deWitt manages to break often with glee and relish.

I can say that the novel is at least mercifully quick to read. You can easily digest it in two or three sittings, and when I say “easily digest” I mean “skim through it.” Much of the stories that are told are quite boring and superficial, and there’s not much that happens once Frances and Malcolm make their way to Gay Paree. In fact, there’s no real reason for the pair to be in Paris except for the fact that it enables the characters to get away from themselves, perhaps. (If not get away from the annoying people that populate their lives in NYC, but, then again, they find a lot of those in Paris, so maybe the move wasn’t the wisest idea after all?) Yes, we know that Frances has an irrational desire to spend every last cent of whatever money she has – which makes her a terrible mother to Malcolm, who, by the way, lives with her. Shouldn’t she be more concerned with making sure that her son has something to maybe strike out on his own with, ignoring for the moment that he seems to be in a permanent state of arrested development? It’s stuff like that that makes you not care a whit what happens to these characters. In fact, the only truly interesting character is the family cat – and that’s saying something, especially considering (SPOILER ALERT!) that he basically disappears somewhere in the back half of the book, never to be found again.

If I were a betting man, and my luck is horrible (so I may be wrong), I have a feeling that Esi Edugyan is going to repeat her Giller win from a few years ago with her new book Washington Black. I haven’t read it, but it’s about slavery, and any good awards jury has got to go ga-ga over a book with serious topical matter. As it stands right now, I’m really not impressed with the three Giller Finalists that I’ve read. Besides, Lim is too much of an outlier since her book is science-fiction, and while Heti is doing interesting things with narrative and biography, her book navel gazes a bit too much. So, in the end, there’s not much worth celebrating with this year’s Giller shortlist, in particular because French Exit is quite the underwhelming read. deWitt can do better than this, and he has, and the book marks a kind of authorial holding pattern – it’s the sort of thing someone would write while trying to figure out what to write next. It’s too bad; deWitt is usually dependable. Oh well, all I can really say is that if this marks the best in the crop of Canadian letters, do we really deserve a Giller Prize? Canadian authors have to try better – give us something we want to read and write it really well. French Exit is indicative of how a Canadian author (who lives in the States, by the way) does neither really. It’s too bad, but, I suppose as the saying goes, there’s always next year. Or the year after that. And so on. Eventually, we’ll get a book from deWitt that is worth celebrating in a Fall awards ceremony. For now, French Exit is not that novel, so my best advice would be to reread The Sisters Brothers and pretend that it won the Giller instead.

3.5 Original, inventive, absurdist, all of these descriptions and more would be fitting. Wasn't quite sure where, in my head, to put this book, let alone how to come up with a rating. Generally, I rate like grnres with like genres, but this one seems to have an identity of its own. What a strange tale with some very unique characters, and a very unusual cat. A satirical comedy of manneres and errors, if you will.

Maybe I was just in the mood for this, but I enjoyed this wuirky little albeit unbelievable story. It wasn't meant to be believed, but it does have some truisims within that were noted. This author is a master at dialogue, even when it was out there, way, way out there, the dislogue seemed totally natural. Some of these scenes I just found so darn amusing, had to reread them again, sometimes they seemed to just appear out of nowhere.

So without rehashing plot, which is kind of impossible anyway, I'll just say I enjoyed this. Not the ending so much, but definitely the getting there. So, if you're in the mood for something different and entertaining, give it a shot.

ARC from Netgalley.

I loved Patrick de Witt’s Undermajordomo Minor. It was completely quirky and weird, but seriously turned my crank. Unfortunately, while French Exit has a similar oddball sensibility, this one fell quite flat for me. The story focuses on mother Frances and adult son Malcolm. As the story opens in New York, Frances learns that all her money is lost, after which she and Malcolm move to a friend’s apartment in Paris, where a number of people drift into their world. De Witt writes beautifully. I love his use of language which has a deadpan oddball feel. I didn’t even mind some of the surreal elements to the story – a dead father channeled through a cat as just one example. But ultimately the story didn’t really engage me. I wasn’t particularly charmed by the characters or interested in their fate. And the story felt somewhat aimless – like a collection of odd events rather than a whole that came together. It looks like de Witt is hit or miss for me – I didn’t much care for The Brothers Sister but loved Undermajordomo Minor. That’s ok. Given the quality of his writing, I’ll keep giving him a chance. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

Patrick deWitt is best known for his 2011 novel, The Sisters Brothers, which has a star-studded film adaptation set to release this fall. His newest book, French Exit, is slated for publication later this summer.

In French Exit, a widowed New York socialite and her adult son flee to Paris in the wake of scandal and impending bankruptcy. What follows is a comical path of self destruction and financial ruin.

Sometimes referred to as the French Exit or Irish Goodbye, the practice of leaving a social gathering without bidding adieu is generally considered bad manners. The book itself is described as a tragedy of manners, and this is true on many levels. While the tone is light hearted and refined, there is an underlying emotional current running throughout. As he wittily mocks high society, deWitt shows the reader an intimate portrait of a broken family, largely through words left unsaid. What at first seems to be a comical romp in the City of Light, is in truth the story of vulnerable people in search of meaning and connection.

Thanks to NetGalley and House of Anansi for the ARC!