French Exit A Novel

This was a light, entertaining read and I enjoyed it quite a lot. I think deWitt accomplished exactly what he set out to do (construct a dark comedy of manners, as I understand it), but I’m not totally sure it’s what I wanted from him, if that makes sense? Still, the characters are interesting and the situation absurd and at times sad and bleak. But somehow still light and with a sense of dark fun. REREAD UPDATE: This had way more depth, absurdity, feeling, and pathos than I remembered. DeWitt could be seen as a tourist through genres, but his ability to bring his own sense of absurd darkness and style to different forms is truly quite something.

an aesthetic beach read. crisp, perfect, easy. airs of royal tennenbaums lavish and abrupt destitution and dialogue. melancholic new york city and paris. a selfishly cruel socialite widow with a good sense of humor. briefly tragic but all around very enjoyable, fluid and vivid even in the mundane. another book that made me want to smoke cigarettes.

i could find things to be critical of but ultimately found it great fun. reasonable depth with earnestness held at arms length 🤌 a pagan life of pleasure deemed sacred. characters were developed and the boxes of my aesthetic preferences and a sardonic tone were checked 🚬🍸 merci

I felt like a lot of chapters ended abruptly, which felt like laziness on the author's part, but I don't know, maybe there was a reason for it. I'm left with a lot of unanswered questions about the characters, but I'm not too stressed about it.

I could be romanticising things, but there's something special about picking a book based on it's cover, and enjoying it immensely. This is the second book of 2018 which has caught my eye based on the inclusion of a cat as one of the main characters. I was not disappointed. French Exit is full of wit and charm, but in a Lynchian way which is tremendously unsettling at times. The complexity of these characters kept me wanting to read and discover more about their inner worlds and perceptions of the human condition. For me this read wasn't a rollercoaster of sporadic events, but more a slow, evolving narrative of a vicious socialite of a widow, a despondent young man, and Small Frank the cat. Note: this could easily be a Wes Anderson film. Fingers crossed.

Ehh

This is the third of deWitt’s novels I’ve read, and while I might like THE SISTERS BROTHERS and UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR a bit more, deWitt is definitely operating on a similar level in FRENCH EXIT, with these flailing upper-class characters a great canvas for his sardonic wit. I find myself comparing DeWitt more to filmmakers than other novelists because of how he applies his distinct voice to different kinds of stories in the same way that the Coens or Soderbergh or Jarmusch can bring the same particular aesthetic sensibility or writing style to wildly different narratives. Here’s a genre stylist—whether the story is a western or a class-based family drama, it still feels uniquely deWitt. And EXIT is certainly a genre piece—a take on midcentury upper-class lit like Salinger or Cheever, with financial ruin and marital stress as central themes. But it’s a weird take, too—maybe more like Cheever’s “The Swimmer” than more mundane stories—with the undersold supernatural elements at the core of the story taken completely seriously. The characters feel like well-written and performed screen roles, stylized and heightened but still lived-in and natural. Frances Price is a Lucille Bluth-caliber broad, gin-soaked but razor-sharp, a quantifiably Bad Person you love anyway. Her son Malcolm is a passive, overgrown mama’s boy—not really likeable, but starts trending in that direction as he gets dragged into maturity by his mother’s increasingly erratic behavior. I mainly approached FRENCH EXIT as a black comedy, but there’s more to it than that. The novel’s subtitle labels it “a tragedy of manners,” and while I initially took that as another joke, this really is a novel about defective parenting, destructive relationships, wealth disparity, and death. Some real shit goes down, the characters have to figure out how to deal with it, and they come out the other side irreversibly changed. But deWitt manages to pull that off in such an entertaining and stylish way that the humor and tragedy only inform and amplify each other.

Mildly amusing in places. Got halfway through only because I had it as an audiobook. Characters (granted, Frances is a character) are not relatable. I did not feel any sympathy for their plight, nor any interest in what eventually happens to them.

This book was bonkers. I finished reading it and then couldn't even begin to figure out how to describe it to anyone else. It held my interest, I felt enough time was given to all of the (completely crazy) characters and each was as fully developed as you could hope for within the confines of this story. Each character was such an exaggerated version of a person it was just a pleasure to read. No moral to the story and it would be easy and enjoyable to read as a fluffy beach book with no deeper thought. It's possible to pick it apart, look for the meanings, look into the characters, etc. But I'm happy with my surface reading at this time, and living with these characters for a bit before searching for more.