Philippe Tapon's Second Novel, "The Mistress," Set in 1944 Paris

A Parisian from Kansas by Philippe Tapon, a Francophile from California, is perhaps the greatest work of metafiction from the 1990s, and (IMHO) as good as the best Calvino and Auster metafiction from earlier decades. In it, a lethally charming and dying Kansas farm expatriate, convinces Philippe Tapon to write a novel about Darren's life and "Hold Back the Dawn" dying. Philippe and Darren argue about events and often supply differing versions. The most memorable scene is back on the farm with Darren telling his parents (including a mother bigger than the one in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and far more malign) that he is HIV+. The book is an exhilarating tragedy-oxymoronic as that may sound. It is also perhaps the most mordantly funny work coming out of Paris since middle-period (pre-minimalist) Samuel Beckett.

I was anxiously looking forward to reading Tapon's second novel. And I am not misusing "anxious" to mean "eager." I was eager, too, but I wondered how the next book could be as good as A Parisian from Kansas. It isn't. It is not even close. Even steeled for second-novel disappointment (sophomore slump), I was very disappointed.

The Mistress is again set in Paris, with a trip south to the countryside that turns out in retrospect to have been even more important than it seemed when reading about it. Rather than an AIDS-ravaged 1990s City of Light, the Paris of The Mistress is a feral, darkened 1944 with the city occupied by the Nazis and rich food scarce except to the Gestapo.

Emile Bastien is a highly regarded gastroenterologist. People clamoring for his services pay in food and in gold. He lives very comfortably with Simone, his nurse/receptionist/de facto wife and caretaker of his two children: a young son (René) and teenage daughter (Paulette). His wife is on her family's ancestral grape-growing farm. To put it mildly, husband and wife do not like each other and do not get along, even separated 364 days a year.

I cannot get into all the implausibilities of the plot without giving away the jolts that are the main pleasure of the short novel. The characters all seem abstractions to me. I'm not sure that I believe the "poetic justice" rendered the Gestapo officer, but it is an indication that Tapon has not altogether lost his inventiveness. The ending is perfunctory and depends upon a very implausible assembly for the novel's last scene.

With no one remotely heroic around, it is hard not to admire Simone's coolness. Too bad that the Joan Crawford of the 1940s is not around to play her in the movie version. As French as the assumptions of the characters, their values, and the setting are, the book seems overly inspired by Douglas Sirk soap operas (thinking of Sirk makes me realize that Sharon Stone will be better than Lana Turner would have been if she could be resurrected from the Sirk era, the 1950s, to suffer indignities and triumph over the contempt of others).

Probably the worst part of the book is Simone's dream sequence. At least she is the title character, so that there seems some justification in shifting to her perspective (from the neutral third-person narration).More vexing, though not as badly done, is the shift of perspective in the middle to Paulette, who then all but disappears as a character thereafter. The assurance the author had in his first novel is missing. He tosses fewer balls into the air, and drops more of them than he did in A Parisian from Kansas.

The ambiguities of collaboration in WWII Paris seem hard for Francophile Americans to resist (I think also of The Collaborator, a considerable let-down after Alice Kaplan's luminous French Lessons). I hope that Tapon was not a one-hit-wonder of a writer and that his next book, toward which my expectations will now not be as high as they were for a second book, will be less B-movie melodramatic. (I don't want to entertain the possibility that I was overly dazzled by A Parisian from Kansas, but, alas, at some point will have to reread it to be sure.)

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I have begun July with a succession of reviews of historical novels. I think I'm ready to move on to other media products...

It seems that Tapon is currently finishing medical school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, having earlier degrees in history and political science.