Patrick deWitt’s French Exit is a page-turner alright. You devour zany plot and sparkling prose, but when you are done, there’s no feeling of satiation. You turn the last page feeling hollow and fractious, like a short-changed customer.
The book is billed as a comedy/ tragedy of manners, but if its intent is to satirise the über-rich, it doesn’t quite pull it off. Along the way somewhere, it forgets what it started out to do and becomes instead a sentimental billet-doux to Frances and Malcolm Price and their privileged meltdown. In the bargain, it ends up not so much a comedy of manners as of bad manners.
Borderline tacky
This mother and son are easily the most claustrophobic pair I have encountered since Gertrude and Paul from D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and it is entirely apposite that the latter’s misogyny stains this book too, although in less obvious ways. Malcolm Price clearly expects that his godawful childhood will vindicate not just his general dysfunctionality but also his behaviour towards fiancée Susan, but her loyalty to his callous, pot-bellied girth is actually rather offensive. And his mother’s contempt of Susan only serves to insult women infinitely more.
Frances Price can afford to offend. In fact, it is what she does best. Besides being rich. It is the imminent loss of her immense wealth that initiates the chain of events the book begins with, culminating in the Prices reaching Paris in order to wallow in the idea of becoming poor — the book ends long before there’s any actual penury. Frances has worked her way through the enormous fortune she inherited after her unsavoury husband’s death — incidentally, she achieved moderate notoriety when she went skiing after finding her husband dead in bed — and faced with bankruptcy, she liquidates all her possessions and heads to Paris, with son and €170,000 in cash.
For Frances, the end of money is “annihilation,” and so begins a semi-crazed, semi-witty, noirish descent into a madness that is meant to come off as super stylish but is somehow always borderline tacky. The very first chapter establishes this. Frances, 65 and strikingly beautiful, is all calfskin gloves and gold lighter, but when she grills a vagrant and tips him only when he proves entertaining enough, she is unbearably vulgar.
Garden variety
deWitt never admits this. Perhaps he doesn’t even see it. Like Malcolm, he seems to see the enormously self-obsessed Frances as nothing but magnificent even though she is not much more than garden-variety malicious. Take away the beauty and the red Chanel dress and there’s very little left.
When the two go dining, the very French waiter ignores them in a very French way, so Frances sets fire to the centrepiece. The scene is meant to establish Frances’s splendour, but only reinforces the nothingness. Perhaps deWitt intended to parody just this nihilism, but it dissolves instead into fawning fan mail.
The mother-son lurch their way around Paris, the young man amazingly uncurious about the future (clearly, his fiancée will provide). Abandoned in boarding school by indifferent parents, Malcolm’s youth is traumatic, until his mother reappears after his father’s death to spirit him away to an irresponsible world where he is always ‘dear boy’ and he, in turn, adores her unquestioningly, and they share an uneasily interlinked social life. The scenario continues in Paris, only now there’s a vaguely melancholic background score — the loss of the wealth that had made their life bearable.
Theatre set piece
Into this mix throw in a Murakami-esque cat that’s possessed by a human spirit, a medium, a garrulous American widow, a private detective, and a French vintner and you have the makings of a semi-surreal, semi-burlesque set piece that’s more theatre script than novel.
Frances approaches her French exit by flushing euros down the toilet, but it’s a theatrical gesture. Like the book, Frances too never rises above the challenge.
French Exit; Patrick deWitt, Bloomsbury, ₹499
vaishna.r@thehindu.co.in
