(DeWitt’s surrealism is cheerful and matter-of-fact, making the novel feel as buoyantly insane as its characters.) In Paris, other oddballs wheel by, lubricated by wine and palaver: a private detective, a medium who can sense when people are about to die, an American dame desperate for Frances’s friendship.įrances is the most realized character of the bunch like the others, she reveals herself almost entirely through outward speech and behavior, as deWitt declines to directly illuminate characters’ inner worlds. Twenty years after the scandal, she has burned through her savings she and her large adult son, Malcolm, decide to sell their remaining possessions and move to Paris, leaving behind Malcolm’s fiancée (Frances dislikes her for ordering gazpacho out of season) but bringing with them close to two hundred thousand dollars in cash and the family cat, Small Frank, who is home to the spirit of Frances’s dead husband.
“French Exit” tells the story of Frances Price, a sixty-five-year-old socialite who is infamous among the Manhattan élite for discovering the body of her husband in their bedroom and then going skiing for the weekend.
The novel is billed, aptly, as “a tragedy of manners.” For a time, it is a miniaturist work of howling nihilism. In “French Exit,” deWitt sees little daylight between noticing the emptiness of social gestures and apprehending the emptiness of everything. Forster-skewer those who privilege appearance over substance. Traditional examples-by Oscar Wilde or E. The novel engages the tropes of the comedy of manners, a genre of societal critique that dates back to classical Greece and locks its gaze on the affectations and hypocrisy of the upper classes.
In his new novel, “ French Exit,” deWitt serves up a modern story, a satire about an insouciant widow on a quest for refined self-immolation. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix, is out in September.) His next book, “ Undermajordomo Minor,” from 2015, wove a tale of castles, apprentices, barons, and thieves. “ The Sisters Brothers,” from 2011, which established his impish reputation, was a slapstick facsimile of a Western, populated by fantastically inept outlaws. Patrick deWitt is an author who picks genres and then puts his own topspin on them.
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