BKMT READING GUIDES
Le Divorce
by Diane Johnson
Paperback : 320 pages
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Soon to be a major motion picture from Merchant Ivory productions starring Naomi Watts and Kate Hudson!
Called "stylish...refreshing...genuinely wise" by The New York Times Book Review, Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce has delighted readers since its publication in 1997.
This delightful ...
Introduction
Soon to be a major motion picture from Merchant Ivory productions starring Naomi Watts and Kate Hudson!
Called "stylish...refreshing...genuinely wise" by The New York Times Book Review, Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce has delighted readers since its publication in 1997.
This delightful comedy of manners and morals, money, marriage, and murder follows smart, sexy, and impeccably dressed American Isabel Walker as she lands in Paris to visit her stepsister Roxy, a poet whose marriage to an aristocratic French painter has assured her a coveted place in Parisian society...until her husband leaves her for the wife of an American lawyer. Could "le divorce" be far behind? Can irrepressible Isabel keep her perspective (and her love life) intact as cultures and human passions collide? "Social comedy at its best" (Los Angeles Times Book Review), Le Divorce is Diane Johnson at her most scintillating and sublime.
Editorial Review
Diane Johnson updates the transatlantic novel so gorgeously rendered by Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; evokes the spirit of such expatriates sojourning in Paris as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and mines the pathos of modern fiction in creating this wonderful and important novel. Isabel Walker, eerily reminiscent of James's Isabel Archer, is a young film-school dropout who travels to Paris to aid her stepsister, who is going through a divorce. Isabel's California cool, American freedoms, and feminist slants comingle, successfully and fractiously, with the customs, biases, and complex sexuality of modern Europe. The result modulates between introspection and hilarity, and a quick, Hollywood-inspired sweep of violent action in the end doesn't undermine the author's mastery of Old World vs. New--in fact, it provides an ironic scrim.Discussion Questions
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