Really?! Could they not know? Was it possible The Grapes of Wrath, celebrated paean to the working classes, was not part of the Steinbeck oeuvre revered by the unrepentantly socialist French?
Well, sure, it was possible. The French did have their cultural blind spots, often about American things. They were occasionally odd in their choice of artistic icons, persuaded that becoming a Bond girl was an untarnished achievement for a French actress, for example. Come to think about it, the dinner gathering had only been talking about Travels with Charley, Of Mice and Men, and Cannery Row. Had I found a gap in their knowledge?
I had not. I had found a gap in my French.
“Les raisins de la colère!” someone suddenly shrieked into the silence with a flash of insight. “Les raisins de la colère!” everyone repeated, bursting into laughter. Of course everyone at the table knew The Grapes of Wrath.
What had I said? The Plums of Fury. I went purple with embarrassment, only slightly less severe for having committed the error in a foreign language. For weeks after the incident, people joyously repeated “Les prunes de la fureur!” whenever they saw me or caught me making a simple grammatical error.
But here’s what made the mockery bearable: they all got the joke. There was no need to articulate why it was funny or describe the special humiliation that happens when you try to sound smart about a book and fail. These people were readers. Nobody thought you pretentious for bringing up a work of classic literature. I belonged here.
Up until now, reading had been a lonely pursuit. During the benighted eighties, kids didn’t go to bookstore readings or await the next Harry Potter on bustling lines at midnight. There were no embossed buttons or fan clubs for favored series. Children didn’t tweet at authors or enter a chat room to compare Wings of Fire dragon tribes with other followers.
Though not quite in the same damning category as chess, reading was far from lacrosse in the high school pecking order. No one ever discussed it. In college, books assigned for class were read as competitive sport—the more critically, the better—and no one seemed to have time to read for pleasure. You didn’t talk about liking a book; you ripped it to pieces.
The Mathieus were the first family of dedicated readers I’d met. They passed cherished volumes insistently among themselves like household secrets. My new French “parents,” Carole and Bertrand Mathieu—she oversaw a research department at the école Polytechnique, he was an architect—had just purchased their Paris apartment with a small inheritance so Carole could live part-time in the city and send her older daughter to a prestigious high school in the Marais, while Bertrand stayed at their house in Picardy. It was an unusual arrangement, even for the French. Carole thought it good for a married couple not to see each other so much. I thought she was brilliant.
Carole and Bertrand were die-hard soixante-huitards, committed socialists, and thorough French traditionalists, with strong opinions. Architecture, according to Bertrand, was life’s highest calling. He had little stickers inciting you to “Dare to be an architect” stuck to various surfaces around the house. Carole loved working at her office, even though she couldn’t care less about business management, the section she oversaw. She smoked two packs of filterless Gitanes a day and held anyone who didn’t smoke in contempt; people who had an occasional cigarette were similarly worthless. She refused to drink water, which she found repugnant, but always had a glass of whiskey at cocktail hour “comme un bon alcolo.” Once a year, she took a solo vacation at the cottage Bertrand had built for them on an island in Brittany. “I stare at the ocean and read my books, all by myself. C’est mer-veill-eux.”
My sixteen-year-old “little sister,” Juliette, would finish her schoolwork and then smoke in her bedroom over Dostoyevsky at night. Years later, after getting a doctorate in biogenetics and while working at the Institut Pasteur, she would read all of Zola’s novels to get through her first pregnancy. Just like all American women do.
Books lined the walls of their apartment and the shelves of their ramshackle country house. Bathrooms teemed with BDs (bandes dessinées, or graphic novels, a form the French were considerably more advanced in) and paperback fiction in translation from Tunisia, sub-Saharan Africa, Poland, and the American West. At night, the Mathieus dispersed, paperbacks in tow. “I am with my book now, in my bed,” was a common refrain. My bedroom on the rue Rambuteau was a tiny nook of a room where, nestled like a kid in a tent, I, too, would read for hours. Of course, I told the Mathieus all about my Book of Books, and of course, they got Bob right away. “Quelle bonne idée!” Carole declared.
In France, the stakes in literature class were comfortably low; nobody in the study-abroad program was actually there to study. But the structure of the course allowed us to fake it, literally. Each week, we were given a reading assignment in French and then asked to write a “pastiche” in that particular writer’s style. We read Proust’s “La prisonnière,” then wrote stories with long sentences with many commas. We read Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit and wrote angry diatribes full of foulmouthed invective and poorly composed mash-ups. For Colette’s La vagabonde, we pounded out lusty sex scenes involving petite French women. The Mathieus found these exercises ludicrous.
But I was more cheerful about it because it turned out I had a decent talent for aping other people’s work. My French improved rapidly, if not for the most flattering reason: I was a hopeless mimic. Stick me with French people, and I begin to speak like a French person. Put me in a conversation with a Brit, and within moments I’m peppering my sentences with “rubbish” and “brilliant” and “at the end of day,” a tendency ripe for ridicule.
Senior year, as soon as school broke for winter recess, I flew right back to the Mathieus for three weeks’ vacation. I also went there directly after graduation, before heading to an internship in the South of France, and when that turned out to be a fiasco, I called Carole, asking to be rescued. “Quick—come to French mommy!” she replied, and I spun right around back to Paris again.
This time, I wasn’t there to learn and I wasn’t there to visit; I needed to make up the money I’d expected to earn at the failed internship. If you had no working papers, in the brutal parlance of the time, you had to find work au noir—literally “like a black person,” or paid under the table. The expression was so widely used it was impossible to solicit job applications without it. The alternative was to let out a tangle of words (hors du loi? sans papiers? illégalement?) that would only persuade potential employers that you didn’t speak French.