Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down

February 15, 2012
A charming, hilarious account of la vie Parisienne as experienced by an observant young American. Working for an advertising agency while he wrote his first novel (You Lost Me There, 2010), Baldwin discovered some very French things about office life in Paris: You have to eat lunch, because the company docks a portion of your pay and returns it to you as meal coupons. Aggressively sexual comments and jokes about Jews or blacks are fine, and anyone offended by them is being "pay-say" (PC, the dreaded politically correct). It's virtually impossible to get fired, even if you rarely show up, do no work and are thoroughly obnoxious. The author also discovered that French banks seem never to have heard of credit cards, and although he and wife qualified as legal residents for health-insurance coverage, the cards permitting them to actually use the insurance didn't arrive until a month before they left. Nonetheless, despite tight finances and loud construction work around their apartment, Baldwin fell in love just like everyone else. "Dude, Paris," said a friend after the author explained that it took him 15 minutes to buy a bottle of water in a cafe because the woman in front of him in line wanted to know what made the salad taste so good, which required the input of two employees and a phone call to the manager. "Honestly, nothing comes close." As the dude suggests, the author and his friends were not so long out of college--he turned 31 while he was there in the spring of 2008--and still settling into adult life. There were lots of parties, and work at the ad agency apparently consisted mostly of jetting around meeting celebrities for the Louis Vuitton account. Baldwin, a witty and polished writer, never pretends to be doing more than taking snapshots, but his vivid impressions of Paris and its people (expats included) are most engaging. Great fun and surprisingly touching.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2012
When Baldwin lands a job with a French advertising agency, he and his wife trade Brooklyn for Paris and 18 months of opportunities seized, the idea being that his nine-to-five will support their otherwise writerly lives in the European capital. Maybe not naively, but idealistically, they aren't anticipating some of the hurdles: an irrevocably bureaucratic infrastructure that turns most transactions into piles of paper and weeks of waiting, or an apartment surrounded on six sides by neighbors' construction work. Baldwin works on his first novel (You Lost Me There, 2010) before and after work at the agencya superlative fishbowl of characters who are so well remembered that one wonders when the author decided to write a memoir of the experience, in factuntil he's satisfied, and the novel is picked up by a U.S. publisher. Baldwin proves that with the right attitude, everything in this perhaps most magically remembered of all cities is either beautiful, hilarious, or both, and his friendly voice and approachable style will grab those who want to be there and those who have never been.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)