What do You think about Le Divorce (2003)?
The book started slowly - seemed like pretty light fare initially. But the book proved very substantial in a thoughtful way by the end.The narrator, Isabel, a young American, lands in Paris to give moral/physical support to her step-sister (Roxy), married to a French man and expecting their 2nd child. Isabel starts as a pretty insubstantial person, but she begins noticing and thinking about French-Californian American cultural differences: good-bad, better-worse - these are philosophical speculations at heart. As the plot thickens, and she deliberately attempts some self-education, the issues expand to geo-political (the Bosnian conflict), and particularly inter-family matters, which become very complicated. Some substantial philosophical issues are raised. There were gentle bits of humour throughout as well, but the book overall was serious. I was reminded in the end of Alec McCall Smith's tales of Isabel Dalhousie, philosopher about everyday life. Johnson's Isabel actually faces richer questions than Smith's Isabel, and exposes their complexity better than Smith.I was quite impressed by the end of the book.
—Mike
Le Divorce is interesting in that the cover (the cover shown here is not the one I had) looks like the book would be Chick Lit. It's not, though, which makes it interesting when you look up reviews. While it's good literature, those who may have picked it up for the cover may not have especially enjoyed it. I found it to be refreshing. It covered quite a few different themes, such as navigating a divorce in France, the property rights of a painting, reasons for marriage and divorce, attraction to power, femininity and the battle of the sexes. One of the quotes I especially liked was, "We wrongly tend to think old people depend on us." When you're young, you assume the world revolves around you and other young people. As you grow older, you realize everything is actually quite the opposite and older people just let youth believe everything is all about them, so they can get on living. So... about the book. Isabel moves to Paris to help her sister Roxy during her pregnancy, since she just quit film school. Just before Isabel shows up, Roxy's husband leaves her and her daughter. Roxy is distraught and fine with letting people believe he is just away on a trip, but as things move on, people begin to learn the truth and Roxy dives further and further into depression. When Isabel arrives in Paris, she does not understand what it is about the French that Roxy loves so much, but the longer she is there, the more it grows on her, especially the food. When Isabel finds herself being drawn to a powerful older man, she contemplates what it means to be a mistress and eventually learns first hand. This novel not only shows some of the differences between Americans and the French through an interesting storyline, but also explores how greed can work its way into the hearts of those that didn't think they were interested in money just by the mere possibility of it.
—Tiffany Young
I thought this book was terrible, and that's not something that I say lightly. I am generally able to find at least one redeeming part of a book: maybe I like the characters, or maybe the prose speaks to me, or maybe there was a plot twist that I particularly appreciate. There was nothing of the sort in Le Divorce.***SPOILERS AHEAD***One would think that a story involving the illicit affair of a girl in her early twenties with a man in his seventies who is related to her through marriage, a mentally unstable spouse of a cheating wife who eventually shoots said wife and her lover, and the legal battle over a piece of artwork worth two million dollars would be a tantalizing page-turner. Unfortunately, this book - while utilizing all the mentioned plot twists - falls very, very short. The main character, Isabel, is a mostly one-dimensional character. (The times that we are afforded glimpses of her inner workings, disappointingly, reveal her to be petty and, in my opinion, unlikeable.) Roxy, Isabel's sister, is a much more believable (and sympathetic) character, and I think the story would have worked much better if it had been told from Roxy's perspective. I, for one, would much rather read about the turmoil faced by a suicidal pregnant expat embroiled in a nasty divorce than the bland observations of a restless twentysomething who has a completely unrealistic (and boring) affair with an important elderly Frenchman.The writing is flat and unengaging, often simply telling us things. In a move that I found infuriating, the author tends to switch to script-mode during scenes with lots of dialogue. The change is jarring, and I think it's lazy. It also irritated me that, while Isabel was the narrator (the story is told from her first-person perspective), scenes appear in the book of which she would have no knowledge. (For example, she often tells about conversations her family has back in California. Isabel, in Paris, would have no way of knowing what was said during these conversations. She might have things related to her, but she couldn't recount the conversations as though she was there.)Finally, the ending was disappointing. I felt that if the author had taken twenty more pages, she could have appropriately wrapped up the porcelain theft and legal status of the painting storylines. I'm certainly not advocating that this book should have been longer (it was all I could do to finish the 309 pages it is without throwing it down in disgust), but, after investing all that time in it, I think I was cheated to have these plots left dangling.
—Katie
