The American

About the Novel

The American is the last of Finkenstaedt's three novels, written in Paris in 1977 while she was deeply engaged with the philosophy of American pragmatism — and it shows. At 118 pages it is almost a novella, compressed and wry, the most formally accomplished of the three and the one most saturated with her own speaking voice.

Its narrator — Patricia, an American woman of fifty — is, as she herself tells us in the opening pages, a pragmatist. She has survived three marriages, three very different men, and three different versions of American life, each time adjusting, adapting, moving on. After a rich dull banker husband in Greenwich; a doomed engagement to a Black militant photographer in New York; a move to Paris with her children; and finally a marriage to Auguste Durand, once the greatest chef in France — she has landed, alone, in a small Parisian apartment, writing restaurant reviews for the Herald Tribune. She has rebuilt her life twice from scratch. She is perfectly capable, she insists, of surviving.

It is this very capacity — American, pragmatic, relentlessly forward-moving — that Finkenstaedt examines with affectionate precision and considerable irony. Patricia adjusts. Patricia endures. Patricia is practical. And in the novel's quiet argument, that very practicality is both her survival mechanism and her limitation: the inability to sit with loss, to confront what she has refused to feel, to cross the street.

The novel's situation is deceptively simple. Patricia, walking back toward the Place de la République on a small nondescript street, stops to read the handwritten menu posted on the door of an obscure little restaurant — "crudités, terrine de lapin, maquereaux au vin blanc, turbot poché, steak-frites" — the honest, simple fare of a modest Paris bistro. She glances into the kitchen through the open door, and sees a wrinkled old man with a wooden leg working beside a grease-encrusted stove. He turns. She recognizes the eyes of Auguste and runs.

What follows is her attempt to understand what she saw, what it means, and whether to go back. Through her interior monologue we learn Auguste's story: a perfectionist and misanthrope who cared about nothing but cooking, who built a three-star reputation through sheer genius and contempt for everyone around him, including the American ambassador whose table he notoriously wrecked — and whose eventual disappearance to Asia became a malicious joke in the culinary world of Paris, the story of the leg he supposedly cut off to serve to the tribe that had fed him. The narrator refuses to find it funny. "Malicious lies are not a joke. Despair and mutilation are not jokes."

It is precisely here that Finkenstaedt's satirical intelligence is sharpest. The Americans in this novel — the ambassador, the ex-ambassador, the rich clients who write letters to Michelin — represent a particular variety of the American mentality she had been anatomizing in her studies: the assumption that excellence exists to serve them, that money confers authority over art, that the world can be ordered like a menu. Auguste's destruction, in this reading, is not merely personal. It is the collision between a man who believes that cooking is an absolute and a culture that believes everything has its price.

The novel ends without resolution. Patricia is still in the hotel room. She still hasn't crossed the street. She still doesn't know what she will do. It is exactly the right ending for a novel about a woman who has spent her life adjusting to losses she didn't choose — and who faces, perhaps for the first time, a loss she might be able to undo, if only she can stop being practical long enough to try.