Ruth Reichl was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times for almost a decade in the 1990s. Many of the readers of her reviews must have been like me: a thousand miles away from the restaurants she reviewed, and far below the financial level required to visit them, but still captivated by Reichl’s gorgeous descriptions. It’s possible I might not even have liked some of the food she wrote about, but I loved her writing. Reichl then wrote several lovely memoirs about her upbringing, her developing interest in food and cooking, and her years of food-writing at the LA Times and NY Times.
But she is not a natural novelist, sad to say. Her second attempt is a failed soufflé, as was her first.
In The Paris Novel, Stella is a young woman in New York. As a child, she was subjected to rather awful sexual abuse from her mother’s boyfriend which is described in painful detail, quite at odds with the tone of the rest of the book and a strange choice by the author. At 30, she is surprised when her estranged mother dies, leaving her a ticket to Paris and $8000. In New York, Stella lives a small and stolid life with an unvarying routine, working long hours (by choice) as a copy editor, eating boiled chicken and rice and salad for dinner, and apparently never exploring the multifarious delights of New York City. For some reason, she decides to take up her mother’s bequest and heads off for Paris.
There are no obstacles in Stella’s path, ever, and that’s part of the problem with this novel. Her New York boss encourages her to go to Paris, tells her to take as much time off as she needs (!), and later, when she wants even more time, tells her to come back when she feels like it (!!!). When she is short of money and needs a place to stay, she is immediately offered one at no cost.
Stella is described as friendless (‘she’d never had a friend and didn’t know how to go about it’), unattractive (‘pale serious face’, ‘mousy hair’) and insecure. Nevertheless, every single person in Paris is utterly charmed by her and goes to extraordinary efforts to help her. Grumpy sales people all but force vintage couture garments upon her at essentially no cost. An elderly man says she reminds him of his dead wife, invites her to gorgeous meals at famous or undiscovered restaurants, gives her even more couture clothing, and drives her all over France in his chauffeured car. It is hardly surprising when the elderly man turns out to be a count with a chateau and several other dwellings which are made available to Stella as needed, and that he is also an old friend of Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Yves Saint Laurent.
And yet, Stella, living this unearned life of luxury, is put off by rich Americans:
The Americans she encountered were, for the most part, a boisterous bunch […] She was embarrassed when they flaunted their money in the struggling capital. […] She had never gone to fancy restaurants, and she was certainly not about to join the ugly Americans and do so now.
It is made clear that Stella has intrinsically French elegance of taste, and is not one of those ugly Americans despite her American origins and life. Americans with money are offputting, but Frenchmen with money are just naturally sophisticated.
There is nothing Stella cannot do, despite being initially described as quiet and helpless. She discovers a famous used-book store, whose owner is also captivated by her and invites her to camp there with the other artistic ‘Tumbleweeds’. Her New York meals were restricted to chicken and rice, but she immediately loves all sorts of upscale French foods — oysters, snails, foie gras, blood sausage, ortolan birds which are eaten whole, beaks to tail — and can identify every obscure ingredient within, and therefore every chef adores her. (There is a gentle sneer at the lowly American tourists who survive on bread and cheese). She has apparently never baked, but her gingerbread evokes 5-star comments from the clientele, and it turns out she is a ‘natural’ cook:
She was unacquainted with leeks, but he handed her an apron and a pile of leeks, [..] she stopped thinking, picked up a knife and began to slice, her hands moving in easy effortless motions.
(I don’t think that was intended to be funny, but it made me chortle.) In a month Stella is good enough to open a restaurant with a famous cook, and can come up with her own haute cuisine recipes:
‘Little ravioli? Filled with langoustine mousse. Truffle shaved on top. And a reduced essence of the shells.’ She was tasting it in her mind.
Stella has no experience with small children, but the 7-year-old child of a bookstore owner is completely taken by her and enthusiastically enters into her adventures. (This unlikely 7-year-old is conveniently precocious, never tired or hungry, fascinated by Stella’s projects, and always ready to eat anything, walk miles with Stella and charm anyone into providing information).
A couple of opportune mysteries arrive to keep the reader occupied for the length of the novel. One involves the model for Manet’s painting ‘Olympia’, a prostitute called Victorine. Stella is fascinated by this painting, discovers that Victorine was a painter herself, and decides to find Victorine’s lost paintings. (Stella apparently has no curiosity about the black maid in the painting). Given the nature of this book, you can guess whether she is successful or not.
A second mystery is the identity of Stella’s father, who her mother has never named. It’s not going to surprise you that he turns out to be also famous, handsome, dazzling, artistic, and immediately devoted to his previously unknown daughter Stella, but I’ll avoid any other spoilers. A convenient romantic interest emerges as well, and is described as unimaginatively as in the pages of a Mills&Boon.
The novel shines when Reichl writes about food:
The soft smooth substance filled her mouth. The flavor grew richer, rounder, louder with each passing second. It was like music, the notes lingering in her mind long after the sound itself had vanished. [..] She took a sip of the wine and concentrated on the way the flavors changed. She thought of music again. The sweet wine was like the trill of a flute, and suddenly the foie gras, which had reminded her more of pastry than meat, became robust, substantial.
but it’s clichéd about Paris. Everything is gorgeous (food, clothes, light on the Seine) except for the occasional local-color grumpy landladies and chefs (who inevitably fall under Stella’s mysterious spell).
Stella [..] skirted the river, crossing the Pont Neuf and making her way across the cobblestone courtyard of the Louvre. [..] She listened to the water splashing across the beautiful fountain in the Square Louvois […]
She had never seen a more beautiful room. Long wooden tables topped with old-fashioned lamps ran the length of the enormous space, which was filled with an almost musical quiet.
It’s all rather blandly saccharine, and I had to force myself to finish.
I highly recommend reading Reichl’s memoirs instead.
I had the same reaction to the first book, and couldn’t bring myself to read another of Reichl’s books – but it is awfully good of you to read it and review it too – I enjoyed your review! Oh dear, people who cannot write fiction, just should not. There are loads of other genres. (Though some people cannot write at all, and again, should desist…!)
Yes, her first novel was just as bad. This book had a long waitlist at the library so I thought there may be something to it. I should have looked at the NY Times review which described it as a ‘sugary bonbon of wish fulfillment’ 🙂
(and Reichl was their food reviewer for a decade, so they tend to review her books positively)
But do try one of her memoirs, they are lovely reading.