Finding Fontainebleau

March 14, 2016
American casualness and exuberance meet French formality and grandeur in this lively, perceptive memoir, a prequel to the author’s The Piano Shop on the Left Bank. In the 1950s, Carhart’s family spent three years in the French town of Fontainebleau, where his father, a U. S. Air Force colonel, was stationed. His reminiscences recreate the culture clash between the family from expansive, affluent American suburbia and dense, culturally rich, but economically pinched post-war France, with its precise manners, rigid schooling (the rambunctious young author got terrible deportment marks), cozy shops, tiny cars (the family Chevy station wagon swam like a whale among minnows), holy relics, heavenly food, squalid bathrooms, and riotous puppet shows. (Road trips to Italy and Spain add catacombs and bullfights to the list of novelties.) Carhart returns in adulthood to view the restoration of Château Fontainebleau, the 800-year-old residence of kings and emperors. His memoir intermingles stories of French royalty, reportage on the conservators’s painstaking reconstruction of original decor, and effusive architectural appreciations. Carhart’s meandering, warmly evocative anecdotes register both the quirkiness of France’s traditions and the civilizing, humanizing influence they exert. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME.

March 15, 2016
The author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank (2001) returns with another celebration of France. Carhart (Across the Endless River, 2009) was 4 when his family moved to Fontainebleau in 1954. His father was a staff officer for the headquarters of NATO command, housed in the Chateau de Fontainebleau. The author and his four siblings were enrolled in French schools, where they had to learn the language quickly. Carhart alternates chapters explaining the 900-year history of the chateau with delightful tales of France in the 1950s. Having returned to live in Paris as an adult, he has been lucky to meet the architect in charge of preserving Fontainebleau. The architect has shown him the attics and gutted remains, explaining the additions and changes of the various occupants, including Marie and Catherine de Medici and Napoleon III. He convincingly argues for his preference for the history-rich chateau over the more popular Versailles. Just as interesting are the stories of children's games played at school and Sunday excursions to Paris. In the city, they explored parks and museums while their father went to his fencing matches. The family lived in a large home with an acre of garden, sufficient household help, and, most importantly, wine delivered to the back door every few weeks. Camping was a cheaper vacation for a family of seven, but spending an entire day setting up their large, nonwaterproof tent took most of the fun out of it. Carhart relates how their father thought nothing of driving on two-lane highways and narrow mountain roads in their giant American station wagon, without a sign of a guardrail. As the author tells it, everything was a lovely adventure. Those lucky enough to have lived and attended school in Europe will love this book, and anyone heading to Paris will surely add Fontainebleau to his or her schedule.

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May 1, 2016
Carhart (The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, 2001) offers a fond and thoughtful memoir of his childhood in Fontainebleau, the small French town in which his air force officer father was stationed in 1954 and to which the author would return to raise his own children 30 years later. An hour's drive from Paris, Fontainebleau is a classic postwar-French settingnarrow cobblestone streets, endless gray walls, coal smoke in the air. It's a place of uncommon resonance for French history and culture, for the huge palace at the town's center, the Chateau de Fontainebleau, was home to some of France's most important historical figures. Carhart reminisces about his schoolboy experiences (struggling with penmanship and schoolyard bullies) and his family's adventures (finicky landlords, treacherous road trips) and concurrently explores, room by room, the illustrious history of the chateau, which housed not only his father's office but also Marie Antoinette's Turkish-themed boudoir and Napoleon's throne room. Delivered with genuine wonderment and gentle humor, Carhart's chronicle is an engaging and personal twist on la memoire des lieux, the memory of a site. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)