Diane Johnson (1)Critiques

A chatty, unique biography of Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith. She was the wife of Victorian novelist George Meredith, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock. She left George Meredith and her loveless boring marriage, had a child with her lover, and then died. This biography tries to imagine what she might really have been like and tries to escape from the Victorian conventions that judged her.

This was too slice-of-life-y for me and just seemed directionless with characters I could give or take.

Mary Ellen Peacock Needles Meredith was married to a man the Victorians considered one of the 'Great Men' of their time, the writer George Meredith. Meredith was someone Virginia Woolf in a later age considered "the most grown up of the Victorian novelists". This book is not about George though. It is about Mary Ellen, his first wife, one of those in the orbit of the famous, but not famous herself, and so destined to be a "lesser life".

Briefly, Mary Ellen was educated well by her father the writer Thomas Peacock. Married at twenty-three, two months later she was a pregnant widow. Four years later she met and married Meredith, who was seven years her junior. Thus began a life of drudgery, while George wrote. Ten years later, at thirty-seven, she had an affair with Henry Wallis and left the marriage. Pregnant once more, she found herself alone and dying of the kidney disease that would kill her at forty. She died alone and in debt, for as Johnson tells us Because of course, as every Victorian knew, if you have sinned you cannot, cannot possibly, expect to die surrounded by your family and friends. George had refused permission for their son to see his mother ever again, and relented only when it was too late.

Johnson describes George as "momentarily afflicted" by Mary Ellen's death. He wrote to a friend following a vacation when I entered the world again... I found that one had quitted it who bore my name: and this filled my mind with melancholy recollections which I rarely give way to. Thomas Peacock was devastated and never fully recovered.

What Diane Johnson has done is write a biography where there are no lesser lives. As she says, But we know a lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one. She looks at as many of Mary Ellen and George's family and social circles as she can, and then fits them together in an inspired and delightful fashion, so demonstrating some of the complexity of Victorian life.

Johnson says she became interested in Mary Ellen ...resenting on her behalf the way she was always dismissed in biographies of George Meredith: the unhappy wife who had left him and, of course, died, as if death were the deserved fate for Victorian wives who broke the rules. She managed to track down the house where Mary Ellen and Henry's son had lived. The couple who had just inherited it let her go through the box room, and there she found letters from Mary Ellen to Henry. Fifty years later, this biography has certainly stood the test of time. Ironically, George Meredith himself hasn't fared as well.

I read this book as "something light", and was surprised to find that, at least in the first half, had the depth of a literary novel. I expected that the story would continue to go along the carefully set out lines: a family conflict in which each character has a different opinion and interest, crises of conscience and goals.
Suddenly, as if the author is in a hurry to forge an ending, we tumble into sex scenes, illicit affairs, a hostage crisis, murder and all the other ingredients of a bestsellers. Did Johnson get a nudge from her editor to juice it up, or is she not able to sustain the literary level she started with? Yes, the book sold well and was of course made into a movie, because of all the sensatioanal action, but it lost its real meaning and its literary value.

I won this book in a give away. When I signed up for the the give awa,y I was under the impression that the book was about Diane Johnson's ancestors in the Midwest, whose lives had been forgotten. I was interested in the stories of these ordinary people. When the book arrived, I noticed the subtitle "A Memoir", I knew that I should expect part of the book to be about Diane Johnson herself.

In the prologue called "A weekend with generals" Johnson sets out to tell how the remark of a French friend about Americans being "indifferent to history" causes her to investigate her forebears. However, Johnson finds it necessary to expound on the presence of two army generals and their wives at the moment her friend makes the remark. This was an early tip off of the name dropping later in the book.

Part II of the book chronicles Johnson's childhood in Moline, IL. To me the description of Johnson's youth was not very different from other small town children.

Finally, in part III, "Eighteenth- Century Beginnings" we read about the ancestors for a little more than 85 of the book's 263 pages. The biography of Catherine Martin (the author's great-great-great grandmother) is the most interesting part of the book. Hers is the kind of life we forget about with its frequent deaths, slow arduous travel, hard work and uncomfortable living quarters. Here I actually learned something.

In Part IV "Modern Days" we are back at Johnson's own life. This disturbed and confused me. Why does the author combine her memoir with the story about her ancestors many generations ago? I had a hard time changing from Catherine's toils to Johnson writing movie scripts with famous Hollywood denizens.
Here we see the main weakness of the book, it, tries to be two things at the same time: a historical biography and a personal memoir. With a little more research, especially about her own life Johnson could have managed two entirely different books. Add to that a total rewrite of the memoir, and the result would be much more the quality writing we have come to expect from Diane Johnson.

Diane Johnson, the queen of novels about American ex-pats in France, now follows one of her ex-pats back home. Lorna Mott is a woman of a certain age who has been living in France with her second husband (French) for twenty-five years. Now finding him still philandering (a his age!), decides to throw him over and go back home to San Francisco. She has a plan to pick-up her long-discarded career as a lecturer on art history, to have a little pied-a-terre in San Francisco, and to straighten out her grown children.
However, she soon finds that things have really changed in twenty-five years. The only apartment she can afford is a semi-seedy one in the foggy Avenues, the powers to be in the art world don’t seem very anxious to set her up on the lecture circuit, and her children…well, one is a depressive divorcee eking out a living selling crafts on Etsy, another seems to have absconded to Thailand with funds belonging to his business, and the third while still dreaming of being a musician, is pretty much just a failure. And let’s not even discuss her former husband who has taken a tech zillionaire for his second wife and is living the life that Lorna thinks that she deserves.
Johnson throws all these characters into a wonderful stew of international manners as Lorna comes to realize that just maybe you can’t go home again after all.

This book gets a bit overwhelming with all the complications of the various members of the family. Only a few of the narrative strands get resolved.½

American actress Clara is married to movie director Cray, who collects manuscripts and books.

Crime follows involving the Morgan Library and the FBI. Unfortunately, not much of interest happens.

Not at all what I expected. Not very satisfying either.

This is a stupid good whodunit novel with one of the strongest first person voices I've ever read. Diane Johnson co-wrote the screenplay to The Shining with Kubrick, and so I pictured the main character as being Shelley Duvall the whole time, which made the book even weirder.

I've been a fan of the author since Le Divorce and enjoyed this one as well. However, seeing some of the negative comments, I would mainly recommend it to hardcore Francophiles (or Paris-ophiles, more specifically). It's not a guide book, but a well-written exploration of one area of Paris, so probably only once you've exhausted all of the other Paris books and want to get a more in-depth view.

A good novel for Paris lovers, although the ending is less good.

Not as good as the first one.

Last Book of 2019

Diane Johnson knows the prejudices and affections of the French as well as she knows those of her American countrymen. So when she writes about the proposed marriage of a young French woman to an American and mixes up the story with a theft of rare manuscripts and a neighborhood spat over the rights to hunt on private property, and you have the recipe for a delightful comedy of manners. Just read, laugh and enjoy.

I'd have given this a 2.5 if half stars were possible.
It wasn't awful, but wasn't great. The story seemed strained, and it never really got exciting for me.
I wouldn't bother to read any more by this author.

I ordered Into a Paris Quartier on abe.com, thinking it was another light and funny Diane Johnson novel.

Instead, it turned out to be a non-fiction detailed tour of the Quartier St.-Germain, including the building
that Johnson and her husband live in for most of the year. Though too much time is spent on the wall outside
their kitchen and the bricked in arch, there are many intriguing descriptions which travelers to Paris will enjoy,
as well as contrasts between American and French perceptions of life, possessions, and history.

For the rest of us, it would be good to expand the book with many, many more photographs.½

I changed the book cover AND my entire review and Tags got erased - it would be good to be warned about this.

Anyway, here's what I remember: Emotional equilibrium lost in subplots and underdeveloped characters.

Gossipy and shallow until Clara gets sent to jail!

Simple and obvious solutions never followed up, like just go visit Lars and get Delia to watch over Mrs. Holly...annoying
because so many minor loose ends around, not to mention what are Serge and Mrs. Persand thinking during the wedding...

...which takes forever to get to as most of us ending hoping that Teem will bail and actually find true love.

Animal Rights are woven strongly into the plot and characters.½

Chloe, a superficial adultery plotting housewife, adds little to the Persian Nights or Days during her short time in Iran.

The plot moves VERY slowly as she notices, then mostly ignores a starving fearful puppy under the bushes outside
her small and dirty new "villa." Worse still, with her group of friends, she meets a starving young girl who she leaves behind
instead of insisting that she be taken to the hospital where half of these friends are doctors. She does not even ask
her doctor lover, Hugh, to accompany her back to rescue the child.

In the next scene she is merely having tea with no mention of the girl.

After reading Diane Johnson's Le Divorce, I was expecting a witty tale with a
challenging plot. This book offers posturing in words and, sadly, lack of deeds.

Plot was intriguing and fun to follow.

Characters were alternately bewildering and amusing:
"I know I am dumb about speaking French...."

Though adultery appears commonplace in this book,
it felt like a lack of character for Isabel to so easily betray
another woman with a husband so open to a mistress.

Not only did the ending feel contrived, with no explanation of how
the murderer knew they would be at EuroDisney,
but the author and her main character's complete disdain and lack of respect
for the never-ending French cruelty of foie gras was painful to read.

Would she have joined in with bull-fighting in Spain or seal hunts in Canada?

I wish I had liked this more. I found myself gradually despising the main character which made it difficult to finish. I admired how Johnson created a air of ambiguity but it felt wrong some how. Maybe I'm not in the mood to be cynical.

Calif. $ goes to ski resort — she tries to do good — things get mixed up — good

Amy Hawkins, a smart, pretty Palo Alto girl who made herself a dot-com fortune, goes to France to get a sheen of sophistication and, perhaps, to have an affair that will ruffle her all-too-steady heart. Amy starts her quest in the French Alps in the town of Valméri, amid an assortment of aristocrats and ski enthusiasts.When two of the hotel’s guests, esteemed English publisher Adrian Venn and his much younger American wife, Kerry, are swept away by an avalanche, Adrian’s children—young, old, legitimate, illegitimate—assemble in Valméri to protect their interests.

Didn't finish. Didn't like.

Bei diesem Buch kann man mal wieder sehen, was Titel und Umschlag so anrichten können ;-) Was aussieht wie ein typischer Chicklit-Roman ist tatsächlich eine amüsante Familiengeschichte, die ihren Unterhaltungswert aus der Gegenüberstellung der französischen und der amerikanischen Lebensart bezieht.
Die junge aus Kalifornien kommende Isabel reist nach Paris, um dort ihrer Stiefschwester Roxy zur Seite zu stehen, die ihr zweites Kind erwartet. Doch statt eines erholsamen Frankreichurlaubes mit ein bisschen Babysitting gerät sie mitten hinein in die etwas chaotischen Familienbeziehungen ihrer Stiefschwester. Deren französischer Ehemann hat sie unmittelbar vor Isabels Ankunft verlassen, da er die Liebe seines Lebens gefunden hat, was seine Familie jedoch nicht daran hindert, die gemeinsamen Gepflogenheiten aufrechtzuhalten und das Vorgefallene diskret zu ignorieren. Isabel, neugierig und offen, registriert voller Interesse die unterschiedlichen Verhaltens- und Lebensweisen und lässt uns Lesende bis in ihr eigenes Liebesleben hinein (natürlich mit einem Franzosen!) daran teilhaben. Es geht um Gütertrennung, Geld, Essen (naturellement ;-)), Kunst, die Liebe und auch um den schlichten Alltag. Ein rundum schönes, unterhaltsames Buch, dass einem nicht nur die Franzosen sondern auch die Amerikaner näher bringt. Und manchmal, manchmal sind sie auch gar nichts so weit voneinander entfernt.
Übrigens, das Ganze wurde 2003 unter dem Titel 'Eine Affäre in Paris' mit Kate Hudson und Naomi Watts in den Hauptrollen verfilmt. Wobei der Schluss im Film offenbar wesentlich theatralischer ist als im Buch.

A fun book. But definitely light reading. Just missed really being good; the biggest problem for me was that so much hinged on the narrator, Lulu's, feelings for Ian, which were supposed to be those of love, and which I could never quite feel/believe. So I had to wade through several passages about how much she loved him without actually believe it, making it a little... tedious.

A very interesting book for its perspective on Muslim and Moroccan culture, something I know/have read very little about.

The ending certainly leaves space for a sequel - I would probably read a sequel to this book.

I did enjoy this as a spy book - I haven't read many books like this, and definitely like the intrigue of it, without the flat out mystery that you find in mystery novels.