Le Mariage Author:Diane Johnson A sparkling new novel -- a comedy of manners from the author of Le Divorce, an acclaimed national bestseller and 1997 National Book Award finalist — Many have compared Diane Johnson to such great literary figures as Jane Austen, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald -- all expatriate writers who in one way or another contribu... more »ted to the development of the "international novel." Johnson puts a contemporary twist on this venerable form with her keen-eye portraits of modern-day Americans living abroad.
In Le Mariage, as in Le Divorce, she masterly portrays Paris -- both its outward splendor and its secret inner workings. Le Mariage introduces a proper young French woman engaged to a struggling American journalist hot on the trail of a breaking story: the theft of a valuable illuminated manuscript from a collection in New York, which rumor has it may have found its surreptitious way into the hands of a reclusive film director living on the outskirts of Paris. The director's wife, an American beauty and former actress, enters a Kafkaesque nightmare as she finds herself wrongly accused of desecrating a national monument. Johnson's clever plot and delightful characters are to be savored, but Le Mariage also offers brilliant insights into relationships between men and women; marriage and morality as it is perceived on both sides of the Atlantic; and the chaos that ensues when well-off, well-meaning people attempt to give something back to an imperfect world that has been so unaccountably good to them. Le Mariage is Diane Johnson at her very best.« less