Houseboat on the Seine

June 3, 1996
The title brings to mind a luxury vessel on the most glamorous river in the world, but readers expecting to learn about the high life in France will be in for a surprise. In this charming memoir, painter and novelist Wharton (Birdy) instead gives us literally the nuts and bolts of building a houseboat, along with generous dollops of humor and local color. As a struggling artist in Paris with his schoolteacher wife and four children, Wharton decided to build his own boat after visiting that of an acquaintance in the mid-1970s. He recounts the family's adventures in making their dream come true. They gave up their Paris flat and moved onto the boat, which docked 12 miles downriver from Paris at Le Port Marly. There they spent the next 25 years adding the finishing touches. The most poignant moment comes at the wedding of oldest child, Kate, aboard ship. The author reminds us that she, her husband and their two children were to perish in 1988 in an Oregon fire, a tragedy he recounted in Ever After. Some readers might have preferred learning more about life aboard the boat than about the details of building it, but this work will satisfy Wharton devotees and Francophiles alike.

July 1, 1996
Living on a houseboat in Paris. What could be more romantic? Well, wake up and smell the cafe au lait. "If someone thinks they can live through the kind of misery we did and stick it out...I say go to it," writes Wharton (Birdy, 1979) in this memoir of his 25 years afloat the Seine. "Living on a boat is not easy but it's fun, a neverending challenge that can lend a real uniqueness to life." Indeed, the houseboat Wharton impulsively bought at his wife's urging presented him with more hurdles than he ever expected. Fewer than three weeks after Wharton had singlehandedly restored the boat to a livable condition, it sank. Refloating the boat on a steel hull required the engineering genius of M. Teurnier. Wharton recalls in exhaustive (and at times exhausting) detail the backbreaking work it took to transform a boat into a home. You can't help but admire his persistence and adventurous spirit. For travel collections.--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal

May 15, 1996
Before he turned to writing, noted novelist Wharton was a painter. He taught art in the Los Angeles public school system, then in 1960 moved with his family to Paris. Later, pretty much at his family's instigation, he purchased a Seine riverboat with the idea that, when fixed up, it would be their home. The boat was moored in a little town outside Paris, and although the setting was lovely, the famous river was up to that point in Wharton's mind not a place on which to reside but "something to paint." His spirited account of getting the boat habitable is a tale of protracted woe followed by--"eventually" relief. In the process of restoration, the boat sank to the river bottom and had to be raised again, and the setbacks kept piling on even after that. But at the end of the very involved process, the Wharton family was able to move in; and although the upkeep of their boat-home is indeed not minimal, it is all worth it. "We have a comfortable, inexpensive place to live surrounded by beauty, a river, the village, other houseboats and natural countryside." How many of us can say "that"? ((Reviewed May 15, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)