Volume 44, Number 2 · February 6, 1997
An International Episode
By Gabriele Annan
Le Divorce
by Diane Johnson
A William Abrahams Book/Dutton, 309 pp., $23.95
Diane Johnson's latest book belongs to a genre, the novel about rites of passage, subdivision American-in-Paris.In the prologue the ghosts of Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, and James Jones are invoked by the nineteen-year-old American narrator, Isabel Walker. So she is not uncivilized, just inexperienced (except, she lets fall, sexually). She is a nice girl from a nice, impeccably liberal family, the daughter of a university professor at Santa Barbara, and has dropped out after a year at the UCLA film school. She has never been farther abroad than Tijuana, and speaks no French. 'Iarrived in Paris as scheduled—it is now six months ago,' she announces '—by coincidence the day after Roxy's French husband, Charles-Henri, walked out on her.' Roxy is her stepsister and senior by five years. She is expecting her second child, and Isabel has come to help her with the first, three-year-old Gennie; and also to see Paris and think about her next career move.
Review, 2157 words
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