PORTRAIT OF A POP LADY

DIANE JOHNSON'S THOROUGHLY MODERN COMEDY OF AMERICANS IN PARIS

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 5, 1997

Page: N14

Section: Books

A critic and essayist of daunting intelligence, Johnson can sometimes be heavy-handed in her fiction, but ``Le Divorce'' is a sparkly novel about the screwy collision of two cultures in the City of Light. As a part-time resident of Paris (she lives the rest of the time in San Francisco), Johnson is in a position to know her poulet from her poule, as well as the psychic street maps of both cultures. ``Le Divorce'' is full of all those dimensions, with good food and interesting sexual liaisons as essential to its plot as garlic butter is to escargot. But now I'm starting to sound like Isabel, before she got with it and mastered the language well enough to eavesdrop on the Metro.

Cheeky, too, for Johnson to name her young American protagonist after Henry James' grander Isabel Archer, since this one -- Isabel Walker -- is a mildly surly Southern California film-school dropout who's casting about for a life, endowed with neither the social connections nor the capacity for suffering that James' Isabel possessed. But the allusions to ``The Portrait of a Lady'' are playful here, wandering lightly among (a) Americans abroad, (b) romantic disasters and (c) material avarice posing as aesthetic refinement. Protected by a California tan line and an entire century of pop-culture veneer, this Isabel is both tougher and slighter than her namesake: perky but steely, ready to handle whatever fortune brings her way.

A younger step-kid of a midlife second marriage for both parents, Isabel has come to Paris to help out her pregnant older stepsister, Roxeanne (that extra ``e'' in her name having French-ified her years before). A gloomily romantic poet, Roxy kept a model of the Eiffel Tower in her room as a child; she fell in love with a painter, Charles-Henri Persand, during her junior year abroad. Now she's as French as she'll ever be, with a 3-year-old daughter, Genevieve, cooing in French baby-talk, a dark little 17th-century apartment on Maitre Albert in the Fifth Arrondissement, exotic in-laws at a country house in Chartres. But le misere has descended upon Roxy's life just a day ahead of Isabel's arrival: Charles-Henri has left her for another woman.

Mildly ennobled by this commonplace mishap, Roxy is still Mme. Pesand (which counts for something, after all); she is still beloved, or benignly tolerated, by her in-laws (even if she fails in the finer nuances of being French, as when she uses the wrong kind of sugar). She still has her family painting of Saint Ursula over the stone fireplace, reminding her of the sweeter side of martyrdom . . . and she has her sister Isabel. Doesn't she?

Well, only for a time; both those precious objects are busily being appropriated by Roxy's in-laws. The painting, which may be the work of Georges de La Tour and thus more valuable than anyone dreamed, is about to become the centerpiece of divorce proceedings; reliable Iz, meanwhile, has fallen for a septegenarian rogue who happens to be Charles-Henri's uncle. L'oncle Edgar, when we meet him, is a silver-hair figure in French affairs, and he's soon wooing Isabel over lunch, and sending wildly expensive gifts from Hermes. Such charisma is too much for our ingenue. She succumbs, and forgets her sister's lamentations, which have taken a back seat to the thrilling dimensions of Isabel's new life.

Isabel's mini-adventures in Paris are gauzily charming: She takes odd jobs as a dog walker and a secretary to an Old Left writer ; she house-sits for some retired Central Intelligence Agency spooks; she huddles in cafes, trying to read Le Figaro or Liberation. Her own oddball parents, Chester and Margeeve, arrive from California, intent upon protecting Roxy and shepherding Isabel, or maybe the reverse, depending upon which daughter needs them more. The plot of ``Le Divorce'' careers through back streets and Parisian flea markets mostly with lighthearted grace, pausing occasionally to offer amusing commentary on, say, the social history of fromage. But there are potholes on these streets, hidden and dangerous, and the graver side of ``Le Divorce'' -- which unfolds with the inexorable timing of Roxy's pregnancy -- is what provides it with the ballast it requires.

Mostly, though, ``Le Divorce'' is an entertainment about the pull of culture: the oddities we take for granted until we are thrust upon foreign climes; the provincialisms every culture embraces without realizing what they are. It is this aspect of the novel that I found the most alluring; when Isabel realizes on the subway, for instance, that she understands the French being spoken around her, the moment resonates with familiarity -- it's the epiphany every traveler seeks, when you realize you've entered the world you've only been observing, or that you're going to make it after all.

There are a couple of thunkers in the novel, one technical and the other plot-related. Johnson has reasonably given the narration to Isabel, but wrenches the story from her a couple of times in order to imagine conversations happening thousands of miles away. (This is a common pitfall of first-person narration, and there are ways around it; Johnson makes the matter worse by calling attention to it.) More understandable but of greater consequence is the insinuation of Euro Disney into the story line. Surely that theme park is such a cross-cultural calamity, sitting there less than an hour away from Paris, that any writer would be tempted; it will probably show up in every American-in-Paris novel for the next 15 years. But as a metaphor, it hollers rather than graciously making itself known.

More deftly composed are the smaller moments in ``Le Divorce'': the arguments over world politics and trivial fashions; the foul-ups and faux pas in dinner conversation; the minor characters whose very otherness is what binds them together. Even Isabel, so worried about going nowhere, has occasional hints of wisdom in her not-yet-30 life. ``There is a sense in which intermittent happiness spoils the rest of life,'' she thinks, ``when it ought to spill over into it, igniting it all into a blaze of joy.'' That sounds more like Jane Austen than Henry James, doesn't it? Maybe Isabel will make something of herself after all.

``Well, no -- what do you hunt?'' asked Chester.

``The deer.''

``Shoot them, I suppose?'' Chester agreed, gloomily.

``Mais non, the birds are shot, the stag we hunt with dogs. It is very beautiful -- the horses, the dogs, the scent, the hunters in their coats. The cure comes to bless the dogs. You run the noble stag to ground, that is the idea. He becomes exhausted and can no longer run.''

We, the Americans, were struck into silence, an embarrassing instant too long, wondering if we understood.

``What happens then?'' asked Margeeve.

``Then the dogs kill the stag. You have the expression `in at the kill,' that is what that refers to.''

Further silence, during which we were collectively appalled, and they had an intimation that we were appalled, though they cannot have known how much.

``Do people ever get killed, you know, fall off a horse or anything?'' asked Margeeve.

``Non, not usually, though, regrettably, sometimes.''

``Oh, good,'' said Margeeve, ``that makes it a little more even then.''

DIANE JOHNSON

From ``Le Divorce''