Mon amie américaine

February 1, 2016
When Michèle, a Parisian woman learns her close American friend has fallen into a coma in New York, she begins writing down her thoughts, addressing her ill friend directly: “Molly, I have to talk to you.” With the diary format, Halberstadt creates intimacy and taps directly into the anxious state of mind of a person waiting for news that’s well beyond her control. There’s something girlish about the narrator, who describes her friend, a film executive (as is the narrator herself), in hyperbole: Molly is “the most sappily romantic girl I’ve ever met, my incorrigible opposite, whom I’ve always found so wonderfully unreasonable.” At first it seems the narrator is writing around her guilt, perhaps because Molly lives a single life in New York, while Michèle is ensconced in banal domesticity with her husband and two young children in Paris. But as the pages unfold, and Molly’s coma lingers, it becomes apparent that the narrator’s anxiety isn’t simply over her friend’s health; she finds herself in a state of inaction in her own life. Unfortunately, the narrator’s overblown descriptions of her friend make it hard to believe Molly is her own character, and not merely the narrator’s projection. Still, there are interesting themes of friendship and guilt in this slim volume. Halberstadt’s approach ultimately reveals that friendships are mirrors, and when bonds break, we have to reckon with sides of ourselves we may not like.

February 1, 2016
Two women in the film industry, one from New York and the other from Paris, share a close friendship ruptured by trauma. This is the third book to appear in English from French author, journalist, and film producer Halberstadt (La Petite, 2012, etc.). The narrator, Michele, who lives in Paris, is writing to her American friend, Molly, who's suffered a brain aneurysm and is in a coma. Entwined with her reaction to her friend's sudden and prolonged illness, she reflects on the beginning of their friendship--they bonded over absurd demands from Tom Cruise--and recalls highlights from their years of attending international film festivals together. She ruminates on her experience as a working mother and compares it to Molly's single and singularly focused life; photos of the celebrities Molly's worked with decorate her home more prominently than snapshots of friends and family. References to "a cartoon pinup astride an atomic bomb," Gloria Swanson's performance as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, and Elton John's singing "Candle in the Wind" at Princess Diana's funeral characterize Molly as a powerful force at risk of extinction. Molly eventually emerges from her coma, but she apparently will never get to read this account in its entirety: Michele writes about her husband's infidelity but then excludes those pages from what she intends to show her recovering friend, adding a layer of complexity to the narrative. The adultery and Michele's reaction to it are described as banalities to be abhorred, just as she abhors sappy American hospital dramas. This concern with cliche is strangely at odds with prose that is peppered with stock phrases such as "blew me away," "smokes like a chimney," and "I stuck to my guns." This superficial language, however, is cut by darker, more incisive imagery. In remembering the story of Pinocchio ending up in the belly of a whale, Michele asks of Molly, "Which belly, inside which giant fish have you gotten lost?" and then answers, "But then you're not a wooden puppet who has to pay for her lies." If at times the novel suffers from its slightness, its dark conclusion is astonishing in its honesty.

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June 15, 2016

A film producer (Farewell My Concubine) and prize-winning novelist (The Pianist in the Dark), Halberstadt offers the portrait of a friendship upended by medical catastrophe. Meticulous Frenchwoman Michele and over-the-top, Manhattan-based American Molly are both in the film industry, but Halberstadt shows that their bonding has resulted less from the weightiness of mutual values or interests--in fact, Michele always teased her friend relentlessly about her eating habits and dreadful fashion choices--than shared moments and a reverberant appreciation of each other's quirks. Then Molly suffers a brain aneurysm at age 40 and ends up in a coma, and the novel unfolds as Michele's soliloquy to and about her friend, a veritable cri de coeur from a soul rocked to its bottom. VERDICT Brief, poignant, and affecting.

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