Synopsis
"I'll never really understand what I wanted. Or what Ralph did. Marriage, unfortunately, never edifies. Never quite kills off the primal urges. How I veered between thinking my natural inclinations would destroy my marriage and how they were the only thing that made it feasible, relieving as they did my feeling of claustrophobia, a sensation that would overcome me, strangely enough, most often when truly knowing or understanding Ralph seemed an impossibility."
So muses Vivienne Yellow, an American woman bound to a hospital bed in the heart of Paris after being accidentally hit by a truck. Through hazy memories, colored by her own morphine-stoked sexual longings, the unforgettable narrator of this arresting and witty debut draws us into her past: what really happened to her that fateful morning as she tried to cross rue du Cherche Midi; her relationship with her father, the famously charismatic naturalist Maurice Yellow; and her wildly adulterous marriage to an emotionally distant man.
Trapped as she is, Vivienne's only link to the outside world is a fellow patient, Sonia, an acid-tongued French teenager with a failing heart. As she begins to heal, Vivienne comes to understand one thing: sex is her refuge, a notion oddly reaffirmed by the stories Sonia starts to tell her about a new patient, a refuge from the Kosovo crisis who tried to save herself by marrying the first man she met.
Reviews
Vivienne Yellow is an American woman with an adventurous past, having spent her years growing up with her father, a famous, much televised naturalist who went just about everywhere. Her past also consists of sordid affairs, even lasting through her marriage to a well-known British television producer. Her past catches up to her as she lies, miserable, in a French hospital after being hit by a truck on a Parisian boulevard. Unable to move, her only company is a teenager named Sonia, who is poor and disillusioned about her life and her own failing heart. Vivienne tells Sonia about her growing up and her troubled marriage. Together they obsess over a fellow patient, a refugee from Kosovo, who quickly ends the misery that they all have in common. As Vivienne begins to recover, she examines her own life to decide if it really is worth living--as she traces her relationship with her father, with men, and with her own (now badly functioning) body. The revelations of her self-analysis come together and make her a much stronger woman. Michael Spinella
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