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An unpersuasive voice in Paris
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In Paris, during his sabbatical in the early 1980s, a dear friend proposed we meet not for drinks at the Café de Flore but for ice cream at Berthillon. “The doctors have forbidden me alcohol,” he said. “In France! Can you imagine?” He’d been having odd health problems, one after the other, that they couldn’t explain. Months later, he developed Pneumocystis pneumonia and got his explanation. He died soon thereafter; our naive days were at an end.
By 1989, the year Susan Conley’s novel “Paris Was the Place” unfolds, everybody knows what AIDS looks like, and if Conley’s narrator, Willow (aka Willie), can’t see it in her beloved older brother, her blindness is engendered by heartbroken denial rather than ignorance. Willie has followed him to Paris, where his slide into HIV-AIDS is but one of many story lines in this multi-plotted novel.
Another concerns Willie’s volunteer work with a group of young female refugees — in particular, a 15-year-old runaway rape victim, seeking asylum in France to escape a forced marriage in India to one of her rapists. Undergirding both of these stories are Willie’s grieving memories of her parents’ troubled marriage and her mother’s death, as well as her struggles with her own continuing estrangement from her father.
When he temporarily left the family, we learn, Willie was in seventh grade. It was then, she tells us, that she “began to spend a small part of third-period study hall reading the dictionary. Part of me felt like I was spinning off the flat surface of the Earth. ... Each dictionary entry was like an orderly, prescribed planet.” Which is presumably the reason each of the novel’s chapters starts with a dictionary definition: “Family history: a shared story”; “Saint: a person of great holiness, virtue or benevolence.” This devotion may help Willie cope with the eternal silence of infinite space, but it wears on Conley’s readers.
We already know the meanings of these entries, and she rarely tells us what we need to know — namely, the underlying meaning of her storytelling, what Willie makes of her experiences.
We travel through rich settings (India, France, the Sonoran desert) and are confronted with dramatic events, but the descriptions too often read like unshaped pages from a travel diary, and too many of the events are merely reported, not embodied. At times, Willie’s voice grows so thin that it’s hard to credit her professed love of words or her vocation as a teacher of literature. Although Willie’s best friend’s pregnancy is clearly meant to offset her brother’s dying, and her love affair with a good man who also happens to be divorced dad is meant to heal the wounds left by her own father, the reader isn’t persuaded.
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