French Exit

by Patrick De Witt

This book was nominated for the Booker Prize this year and also for a Canadian Prize.  I wish I had read my review of his other book Sister Brothers, then I probably wouldn't have been interested in reading this one.

I don't know why his books get such acclaim.  This story was silly and the main characters were a waste of human space in my opinion.  Is that what people like today, people who are more useless and more self-centred than they are?

It is the story of a mother and son who when the book opens are living in New York.  The back story is that the man's father died years before, his wife discovered him dead and left him there to go off skiing or something for a weekend.  When she came back she reported the death.  This story was scandalous and she was villified in the media.

At the time of his father's death the boy was at a private school, his mother arrives one day to pull him out of school and announces his father has died.  The father was wealthy and they are living off the wealth in an extravagant fashion in New York until they are told that they are basically insolvent and will have to sell all their property. The son and his mother have become very close.  The son does not work nor do much of anything.

The wife has a cat whom she is convinced has taken in the spirit of her dead husband.  It appears this might be correct.

They decide to leave for Paris and live in an apartment offered to them.  The Mother is fine with leaving but the son is devastated as he is engaged to a girl.  They do leave on a ship and the cat is drugged so they don't have to deal with all the paperwork of bringing an animal on the ship and into France.

On the ship the young man meets a tarot card reader and they have sex.  The young woman had successfully predicted the death of one of the guests on the ship.  She is fired when the woman dies.

When the mother and son arrive in Paris they live extravagently, the mother literaly gives money away and flushes it down the toilet.  The cat runs away and even though they try to woe him back using the services of the card reader and the bank employee/cum private investigator, the cat decides to continue to live a hard lonely life on the streets of Paris.
The Mother and son inherit a rag tag collection of guests who come to live with them in the apartment including another American, the tarot card reader, a bank employee and eventually the son's fiancee who is now engaged to a former fiancee, and her fiancee.

The mother, after she has given or spent all her money, commits suicide in a bathtub.

That is the end....

Don't really care for the story or any of the characters.