To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books March 27, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/03/27/johnson "Le Mariage" by Diane Johnson Yanks abroad and French nationals still bewildering one another in a funny follow-up to the bestselling "Le Divorce." - - - - - - - - - - - - By Elizabeth Judd Diane Johnson's latest version of the international novel is a clever twist on the joke "Enough about me. Let's talk about what you think of me." Americans, she knows, rather than envying the French their foie gras and Godard, rarely give them a second thought. But we are extremely interested in what those snobbish, stylish Europeans think of us -- of our directness, our money, our industry and our fashion sense. In "Le Mariage," two American expats, Clara Holly and Tim Nolinger, navigate the trans-Atlantic divide. Clara is married to Serge Cray, a reclusive Polish director, and the couple live together in a ritzy Parisian suburb where Clara belongs to the "American world that exists like a specialized form in a complex ecosystem, dependent on its hosts but apart from them." Tim, a freelance journalist, is another type of transplant altogether -- marginal, fluid, opportunistic: "There are a dozen, or dozens, of Americans like him in Paris, clinging to the rather precarious livelihoods they have managed to score, for the pleasure of being there or because they have burnt their bridges and have no idea how to return." The antitheses of the innocents abroad in a Henry James novel, Johnson's Americans in Paris are steeped in the cultural syntax of both countries -- and powerless to do anything but cynically observe and snicker. At a wedding party for Tim and his Parisian fiancée, Anne-Sophie, Tim is both irritated that his future mother-in-law has hired a maid to dispense ice cubes (something she's heard Americans inexplicably adore) and embarrassed that his friends conform to stereotype by cloddishly ruining their kir champagnes with ice. Johnson is a beguiling writer, serving up catty observations with loopy good humor. The sharpest social critic in this novel is Anne-Sophie. Unlike the other French characters, who believe Americans are rich and lacking in subtlety, Anne-Sophie adores everything American, exclaiming happily about the tackiest aspects of our mass-market consumerism. In her exuberance (fast food, strip malls, Circuit City!) she points unerringly to all that's wrong with the United States. "Le Mariage" shares with "Le Divorce," Johnson's 1997 bestseller and a National Book Award finalist, a subject, a sensibility and a handful of characters. Each novel is a comedy of manners, but "Le Divorce" runs out of steam three-quarters of the way through. "Le Mariage," on the other hand, steadily gains momentum as seemingly minor threads recur, gaining interest with age. In one such thread, the Crays refuse to let hunters onto their property, defying a French law that permits your neighbors to shoot partridges and deer where they will. For the hunters, the Crays are the embodiment of American hypocrisy, representatives of a cavalierly murderous, gun-happy nation quibbling over a few dead pheasants. Clara and one of the hunters fall in love, the grudge match escalates and law and emotion collide more brutally with each fresh contact. "Le Mariage" is a slight novel but, within the scope of its modest ambitions, a near-perfect one. Johnson is a masterly storyteller who can pull off a storybook ending -- love, joy, a trip down the aisle -- without making us gag. "To look for happiness was like looking at the sun during an eclipse. Not only did the sun disappear, but you burned your eyeballs too. Yet here, strangely, unsought for, was happiness." The true marriage, of course, is the one of two cultures, poorly matched and prone to wild misunderstandings, yet ineluctably drawn together in a passionate and lasting embrace. salon.com | March 27, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Elizabeth Judd lives in Washington. Her work has appeared in the Village Voice and the Philadelphia Inquirer.