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Twenty-six year old Emma Roberts loves her mother very much, but Emma fears she is on the way to becoming just like her --- cerebral, reclusive, alone. In graceful, almost fussily precise prose, Emma relates the story of her decision to leave her home in London for Paris, hoping that this carefree city might loosen the binds of her very British reserve.
There she meets Francoise Desnoyers, "...a striking woman, with bold Gallic features, not beautiful, but more than that, electric with an energy that made her presence in the library dangerously welcome." They become friends in the way that totally opposite characters often do, and Emma humbly accepts her role as a lesser light and confidant, while constantly comparing her own cautious nature to her friend's mercurial, entitled personality.
Francoise invites Emma for a weekend at L'Ermitage, her widowed mother's grand country house, where Emma spends her time avoiding the quarreling mother and daughter and wondering whether or not she envies her friend. She meets some of the members of their social circle, one of whom is the man her mother expects Francoise to marry. Emma earns the approval of Francoise's mother, an important fact for Emma, who seems very preoccupied with not giving offense to anyone for any reason. She knows she's attracted to Francoise because Francoise does whatever the heck she wants --- for a while, anyway.
While Emma is in France, her mother dies suddenly. She returns to London to deal with her uncle, whom she detests, and her inheritance. Impulsively she buys a London flat of her own, waiting for something or someone to shape her life. When she's in London, she misses Paris; when she's in Paris, she feels she really belongs in London. She goes back and forth between the two cities at least five times in the course of the novel, and wonders if Francoise is taking advantage of her. She dreams of "pure bliss" yet settles for boring relationships with undemanding male friends as reserved and complacent as she is: Michael in Paris and Phillip in London.
Francoise rebels but ultimately bends to her mother's will, and Emma resigns herself to her own quiet fate. "But then I know that both she (Francoise) and I have passed the age, and the stage of life, that permits such fantasies, and realize, perhaps a little bleakly, that both of us have done quite well, and that it would be pure folly to go in search of more."
This is largely a novel of astute and detailed self-observation, which an uncharitable person might call navel-gazing. The writing is fine, but the reader longs for even some impure folly to liven it up. You know you're desperate for action when the high point of a dinner party is M. de Robillard's petit pain shooting off his plate and landing in Emma's lap. In the end, Emma's meek fatalism and indifference became for me a transcontinental disappointment.
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol
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