Ignorance

Starred review from October 22, 2012
The parochial prejudices of two provincial towns, Ste.-Marie and Ste.-Madeleine, and by extension France itself, are brilliantly revealed in this uncompromising novel of WWII ignominy and grief from Roberts, whose novel, Daughters of the House, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Marie-Angèle Blanchard and Jeanne Nérin both attend the school run by the local rectory, but the similarities end there. Marie-Angèle, a callous, reflexive Catholic with the proper petit-bourgeois background, weds a corrupt notable and black marketeer who extorts Jews during the war, and she eventually achieves wealth and status and gives birth to seven children. Jeanne, a penniless Jew who works as a maid in a bordello frequented by German soldiers, is ostracized and publicly humiliated, as a “disgrace to womanhood,” after the war despite her Resistance activities, and forced to abandon her child. Lavish descriptions are the author’s trademark. A mere couch will never surface in Roberts’s world: “the pink brocade sofas were fat and plush. Cosy armfuls you’d call them if they were girls. They lolled about the room sleepily, brazen and half-bare, their covering tasseled shawls, gypsy bright, slipped to the floor.” Mostly, Roberts’s polished, ornately wrought prose adds depth and a sense of acute realism to her captivating story—which flows seamlessly between the protagonists as they take turns narrating this accomplished and inspired novel of wartime France. Agent: Ayesha Karim, Aitken Alexander Associates.

October 15, 2012
This is a taut, unsentimental story of poverty and prejudice: two girls, one Catholic and the other a convert, grow up in a small town in Catholic France in the period before World War II. The war divides them from each other and their values. Roberts (The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene, 2007, etc.), Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, was made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government. She has written works in multiple genres. In her latest novel, Jeanne and Marie-Angele attend the convent school in Ste. Madeleine. Marie-Angele is Catholic and daughter of a local shopkeeper. Jeanne is Jewish and poor. Her mother is a laundress. Though her mother converted, the change made no difference in their circumstances. The style is terse, clipped and idiosyncratic. The mind has almost no place in these characters' hard lives, except in the rudimentary plans for survival, and even these plans are directed towards body modification: The Jews dye their hair blond before preparing to flee. Surreal moments of great power arise from the crushing force the world exerts on characters unprepared, because it is impossible to be completely prepared. The forces of history are relentless, the conditions of poverty grinding. A worthy novel unusual for its tough-minded, unsparing story and the restrained method of its telling.

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December 1, 2012
The tragic consequences of conformityin one woman's life and in a continent at warare on painful display in this multivoiced narrative. Jeanne, the central figure and most prominent narrator, is a poor, half-Jewish girl living in France as WWII approaches and arrives. She strays dangerously from convention as the war goes on, leaving her not just the Germans but her very neighbors to fear as well. Her rebellion begins in childhood after she, along with fellow convent boarder Marie-Angele, is abused by a religious figure. Marie-Angele, however, responds to this by becoming fiercely decorous, and in her righteousness becomes as much of a threat to Jeanne as any scapegoating hoard, suspicious German, or abusive cur'. Roberts' characters are electric and affecting, her prose elegant. One reads in perfect confidence that the mosaic of voices will make a meaningful wholebut it doesn't. There are hints of larger significance, intimations of pathosbut these seem unearned and false. In pieces, it is an illuminatingly narrow and feminine view of the war, but as a whole, this novel will leave some readers feeling disappointed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)