Memoirs of the Frog Prince

Written in a alternately stilted and overblown prose, this first novel concerns a couple who try to create a lasting bond out of sexual attraction and neediness. Two expatriate Americans living in Paris, Arthur, an alcoholic, and Adrienne, a romantic determined to turn a frog into a prince by the force of her love, meet in the aftermath of failed affairs. She supports him, sustaining his conviction that one day the photographs he obsessively shoots will be salable. Instead, in the novel's single funny episode, he and a musician friend sell candy to some French students on the prowl for LSD. Arthur is thus flush enough to buy his own booze, and his inebriation leaves him, mauled, unconscious and smeared with excrement, in the hallway of Adrienne's apartment. Whatever his condition, Adrienne manages to endow him with princely qualities, refusing to sacrifice her dream; Arthur, meanwhile, doggedly hangs on to his meal ticket. Their story is the everyday tragedy of countless couples; when at last they part, Arthur sinks further into degradation, Adrienne into fantasies of his return. Although the world is filled with Arthurs and Adriennes, these particular two never come to life. (September)