The Elegance of the Hedgehog

From the book jacket:

Release date: September 2, 2008

Renee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully-constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society's expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Renee: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her loge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renee lives resigned to her lonely lot with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours [no; the man who moves into his place] will dramatically alter their lives forever. By turn moving and hilarious, this unusual novel became the top-selling book in France in 2007 with sales of over 900,000 copies to-date.

I’ll confess: I didn’t read the entire book. But this is one of those books where you can skip entire chapters and not feel like you’ve missed anything.

That’s not to say it’s a bad book. It certainly isn’t plot-driven; it has only 3 plot events. It gives us a long, leisurely, intimate tour of its main character/s’ thoughts, which are usually clever, interesting, novel, funny, and well-written. Very French.

This book has four big problems. The biggest is its length. A standard novel or movie has a catalyzing event that complicates the protagonist's life and makes things interesting. Conventional wisdom is that this should be on page 10 of a 120-page screenplay, or in the first 3 chapters of a novel. Here, it's past the halfway point. So the reader spends the entire first half waiting for this event (which was given away on the book jacket). This first half is clever, but not dramatic.  For example, Renee takes 2 chapters to explain why Husserl’s phenomenology is a fraud. Maybe this is a comment by the author on how Renee scorns Husserl for his detachment from reality, while she herself mirrors it. Clever, but too long and not made clear to the reader.

The second big problem is that the first half of the novel has 2 viewpoint characters who have the same strengths, weaknesses, vices, and attitudes. They think the same thoughts about the upper class, cassoulets, and Japanese culture. They are both self-taught geniuses who hide their intelligence from the world, and are focused entirely on themselves, never thinking of the lives of other people except as those people affect them, churning through endless cycles of scorn, superiority, and self-pity. They are the SAME PERSON. The author writes Paloma's sentences using shorter sentences and a more colloquial style. Paloma uses sentence fragments; Renee writes complete windy sentences. Paloma prefers dashes; Renee favors semi-colons. That is the only difference between them. They should either have been made distinguishable, or combined into one character, converting the novel into a short story.  And Paloma should not have been stuffed into the body of a 12 year old, then made to writes sentences such as "The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects," or, "That should simply incite us to take special precautions with them as we would with very fragile objects." She’s smarter than Ender and more erudite than Harry Potter of Methods of Rationality.

Problem three is that the characters never confront, and the author seems unaware of, their fatal flaw, which is that they care too much about art and not enough about people. They spend all their time studying paintings, poetry, novels, and music, and justify their lives by their erudition. It isn't clear whether Mr. Ozu breaks them of this habit or not, as their warm feelings about him are all associated with his agreements with them about art. It’s a lengthy character study that nonetheless fails to provide convincing reasons why they are that way, or explorations of the consequences. It’s never clear whether the author realizes that her main character/s, who spend all their time looking down on the intellectual shallowness of everyone else, are themselves just one or two onion-layers deeper. As I said, very French.

Problem four is the ending. The climax is Renee overcoming a childhood memory, in standard Freudian manner, that forbade her from believing she could have upper-class friends. Yet, though the author wrote an entire novel in which the character's arc is to realize that she can transcend class boundaries, she didn't believe it herself. Instead of transcendence, we get a sudden tear-jerker ending that has fate deny that transcendence in just the way Renee had supertiously expected, entirely contradicting the novel's theme.

The sentences are beautiful, and the characters and their thoughts are interesting enough to sustain 30,000 words (not 90,000). But it's too long, too superficial, and the author wasn't, I think, certain what the story was actually about. Katherine Mansfield could have made a beautiful short story out of it.