Amazon.com Review
The act of writing a first novel has a lot in common with being an au pair. Each is often accomplished by a young, overeducated woman who believes she is the center of the universe. This can make for dull reading, and sometimes for unattended children falling down staircases. But Lily King's fine first novel--about an au pair--neatly avoids the solipsism that often plagues coming-of-age stories. In The Pleasing Hour, 19-year-old Rosie has fled New Hampshire for France after undergoing an anguishing loss: she surrendered her newborn son to her infertile, married sister. Rosie is literally hollowed out, unable to see beyond her own pain. "Nothing in my body felt right. It seemed to be ringing with pain but there was no part of me that I could point to and tell her, Here, here's where it hurts." In Paris she moves in with the Tivots: the unassuming, shambling father, Marc; the glamorous and unforgiving mother, Nicole; the beautiful daughter, Odile; the merry daughter, Lola; the momma's boy, Guillaume. Rosie steps into the highly polarized atmosphere of the Tivot household, unconsciously upsetting its equilibrium by throwing in her lot with Marc and Lola. And when the family heads off to Spain for vacation, the power balance shifts palpably, since Rosie is the only one who speaks Spanish. Even Nicole grudgingly admires her. What's more, Rosie notices Marc regarding her with the "relentless curiosity he'd had in his eye since we landed in Spain." On Mallorca, the two consummate their relationship, and the betrayal forces her to see beyond her own worries to the entrenched pains and allegiances of her host family.
King cleverly iterates this message in her narrative. She occasionally, deliberately, allows each member of the Tivot family to voice the story, and this opening-up of the narrative allows the world to flow into a novel whose themes might otherwise seem petty. In the end, the author doesn't perpetrate the dull crime of youthful self-involvement--she comments on it. We care for Rosie from the start, but we like her a lot more as she comes alive to the people around her. --Claire Dederer
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly
A year in France brings a young American new reserves of sympathy and maturity in this poised, accomplished first novel. Nineteen-year-old Rosie, King's sensitive narrator, arrives in Paris on the first day of the school year, set for her job as the Tivot family's au pair. The other au pairs (in French usage, filles) are cosmopolitan students drawn to French culture. Rosie, however, has come here to flee her past: she became pregnant as a deliberate act of charity, giving up her baby so her infertile sister could have a child. But that decision has only heightened her omnipresent sense of loss. Her months with the Tivot family on their houseboat bring her new and difficult human connections: to the inquisitive, needy 12-year-old Lola and her younger brother, Guillaume; to their unhappy, astringent mother, Nicole; and to their father, Marc, with whom the reserved Rosie gradually falls in love. After Lola catches Rosie and Marc holding hands on a family trip to Spain, Rosie is sent to a small town in Provence to care for Nicole's Aunt Lucie, in her 90s. In chapters interspersed with Rosie's own story, Aunt Lucie fills in the background of Nicole's family, a grim account of inheritance and treachery during WWII. Expertly constructed, full of surprises, superbly paced and sweetly sad, King's book hardly reads like a first novel; her skilled observation and careful narrative voice prevent the wartime plot from seeming sensational, and keeps Rosie's saga of melodrama. In fact, the seamless integration of theme, plot and voice produces a rare sense of intimacy. Rosie's final discoveries about France, about families and about herself through Lucie, Lola and Nicole take her on an inward journey readers will feel privileged to share. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
An intriguing but fractured debut about a downhearted American au pair's year in France: it's intended as a retreat from pain but instead brings her awareness of the painful burdens others must bear, and for far longer than she has carried hers. Coming to Paris to live on a houseboat was like stepping into a dream for 17-year-old Rosie, even though Nicole, the mother of her family, was a daunting, cold beauty and Rosie's French was pitifully poor. No matter. The business of shopping, preparing meals, and caring for the three well-behaved children of Nicole and Marc kept her from brooding over what she left behind in New Hampshire: a newborn, her own child, a baby shed contrived to conceive in order to give to her infertile sister and her husband, only to have a change of heart after the boy was born. As months pass and her involvement with her host family grows, Rosie ponders the dynamic between Nicole and Marc, a successful but less glamorous doctor who seems to have little in common with his wife. An Easter holiday in Spain loosens everyone up, but for Marc that means increasing his appreciation of Rosie, and they find too much time to be alone. Discovered holding hands by the youngest child, Rosie tries to bury her feelings for Marc and make amends by offering to care for Nicole's dying aunt, who lives in the southern village Nicole left in her youth and never returned to. Rosie flourishes in her new surroundings while learning the sad story of Nicole's family, and when Nicole decides to pay a visit finally to her birthplace, to lay to rest the ghosts of her past, it is Rosie she chooses to accompany her. The central character's complexity and many of the descriptive details are pleasing, but the plotting here has more artifice than artfulness, one consequence being that the children are fleshed out in the beginning only to be cut loose in the end. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
YA-Only gradually do readers learn why Rosie, an 18-year-old American, has been caring for the three Tivot children on their family houseboat. Raised by an older sister now happily married but infertile, Rosie became a surrogate mother for Sarah. Only after giving birth did she realize what she was renouncing and, in heartbreak, fled to France. The book opens with the teen in rural southern France, her stint as an au pair behind her. She is companioning an elderly family friend of the Tivots, and she acquaints Rosie with their background. These weeks in the countryside with the nurturing woman provide the girl with a more mature view of her experience. Resentment, self-consciousness, and confusion give way to acceptance and understanding of her relationships with this family. The story then flashes back to Rosie's first day on the houseboat. She is aware at once that the cool sophisticated mother, Nicole, is disappointed with her. Odile, more nearly Rosie's age, is inclined to her mother's aloofness. Lola, the middle child, offers immediate affection and the younger boy is accepting as well. Beautifully written, with complex characterizations, the book creates the ambience of France in both city and country scenes. King is particularly successful in revealing Rosie's past and present insecurities. Of special value to teens is the examination of the young woman's strengths-her loving nature, her willingness to sacrifice, and her ability to assess her choices and move on with her life.
Frances Reiher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: Plaire
Plaire is not a wealthy town. It is not one of those immaculate, romantic villages described in books about the south of France. Its streets are not made of cobblestones or clogged with visitors in the hot months. It does not have red cliffs, or châteaux, or the carapace of a fortress. The churches are unremarkable, the café terraces viewless. In the afternoon the narrow streets grow sinister, blackened by enormous shadows with clawed edges that slowly scale the pitted stucco walls. Half-dead ivy creeps down to meet them. Even at two o'clock on a bright spring day, you can turn down one of those streets and all light and heat will be gone. You will have to wait until your eyes have adjusted to move on. Through the slats of closed green shutters above, you can hear music or the sound of water in a basin or heavy plates being stacked or unstacked. The grocery bags will start to cut into your fingers, and the two miles back will seem, from that dark street, unachievable. But once you reach the valley, and Lucie Quenelle's farmhouse appears on the next rise, there seem to be seven suns stretching across the sky, each one celebrating your return.
She is waiting for me in the garden. I can see her straw hat twitching as she swats at something. At the sound of my sandals through the grass, a smile appears just below the hat's brim. It does not feel like penitence to be here with this old woman, though I know it should.
Once she sets me to work on the table grapes with her, it doesn't take her long to start in with more questions. She has so many, mostly about Nicole.
"She was very careful as a child, deliberate. Is she still?"
"Yes." I try to be curt, entirely uninterested.
"And so equable."
"Yes."
"Perhaps you are too young to know exactly what I mean."
"Perhaps," I say, feeling too old to argue.
She's teaching me how to rewire the trunks of the vines to their posts. Beside her quick spotted hands, mine work clumsily.
"Would you say she's happy, Nicole? Would you say she married the right man?"
"I don't know." But she wants more. She will not stop until she's wrung me dry.
"He's not a man I would have married," I add.
"Why not?"
I can't think of one word to throw her off.
"It's hard to pinpoint, isn't it?" she says, furrowing her entire face. "But there's something about this Marc Tivot. A man should never make you feel old."
"She looks half her age," I say, deliberately misunderstanding, veering away. "She's in good shape. She's healthy, nimble -- "
"Nimble! Where did you learn a word like nimble? Sometimes you surprise me with the words you know. How is it that you can have such an extensive vocabulary but absolutely no memory for the definite articles?"
"I don't know. It's just a block I have," I say, embarrassed my errors have been noticed already.
Nicole's daughter, Lola, always insisted it was obvious. Look, she said, running to the table she had just set, a knife is masculine and a spoon is feminine. Look at them. You can just tell. Look at this plate. It's a girl's face. And this glass, it's a man. Can't you see it? Lola had bangs and a birthmark on her ring finger and pronounced my name, Rosie, with the best unrolled r in the family.
"Here. Not so tight. Please," she says with sudden impatience. "You're strangling the poor thing. And look down here. His roots are being pulled up."
"Sorry." I let go the vine.
"I love this earth." She squeezes a fistful and, when she releases it, it keeps the hollows of her fingers and the sharp peaks between them. I feel her smiling, waiting for me to look up. But I can't receive her at times: her pale eyes, her pressed white collar and the triangle of scaled skin it reveals, her nimble hands working the earth. Leste. All my words lead back to that family.
Marc called me nimble during my first week in Paris when I caught the glass at dinner. Their son had knocked it hard off the edge, reaching for the lemon syrup, and I caught it, a full glass of water falling from the table. Marc called me leste and the whole family looked at me, everyone but Nicole, like I might work miracles.
"Look at you. You're freezing," she says, leaving a hand on my bare leg. "The body is so beautiful when it's young. Enjoy it, Rosie."
But I can't feel anything -- not her withered hand or the earth she loves or the suns that are still blazing above us -- and I know if there's one thing I ache to abandon it is my body.
"You are eighteen, nineteen?"
"Nineteen."
"What on earth could make a child of nineteen so..." She studies me for a word that thankfully never comes. "When I was nineteen," she continues, "we moved here, to Plaire. Nicole's family lived right tip there, through those trees, which in those days weren't so high. You could see their house, from here, and the sun, as it fell below those mountains. But everything's higher now. Or maybe I've shrunk. I don't know what's different today about the sun and the air, but then the sky would go purple sometimes -- not purple, exactly, but mauve. That's what Nicole's mother called it."
"You knew her mother?" It is an odd image, Nicole as a child.
"She was seventeen years younger than me, but she ended up being the closest friend I ever had. She told me that when she was a little girl she'd sit on her grandfather's porch in Roussillon and have tea and cakes during the mauve hour. I never hear the word mauve without thinking of her, but the light's changed since then. Anyway, I think it's probably time."
"Yes."
"But we've done quite a lot today. Thank you."
She is giving me room, board, and two hundred francs a week, but she has thanked me every evening of the three weeks that I've been here.
We put the tools and the wire back in the broken basket and follow the path through the roses to the back door. She takes my arm on the steps for balance. "Ah," she says. "Can't you smell the stew? You were right to put in that extra basil." She gives my arm a good tug as if she might be falling, then casts off from me altogether as we enter the house.
After dinner I will write my sister a one-sentence postcard with no return address: Walked the path van Gogh walked with his bloody ear. It's a lie -- a place Lucie Quenelle has told me about farther south.
In the New Hampshire house with the red door -- and the gold slot into which these cards are dropped -- live my sister, her husband, and the baby I gave them. All I can hope is when that child has words he will tell them the things I cannot. Perhaps my whole life here in France will spill out of his mouth.
Copyright © 1999 by Lily King --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Lily King studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Syracuse University, where she won the Raymond Carver Prize for fiction. A MacDowell Colony fellow, her stories have appeared in Ploughshares and Glimmer Train. She lives with her husband and daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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