My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

A transplanted Londoner in contemporary Paris struggles to write an essay on Gertrude Stein in this arch novel from Levy (August Blue). The unnamed narrator is captivated and frustrated by her subject (“Gertrude transmits some sort of misery to me. The exhaustion of reading her prose. The never getting to the it of it”). Her two friends in Paris are bemused by the Stein obsession. There’s Fanny, a promiscuous Frenchwoman who works in finance and is “in a constant state of amorous flush,” and Eva, a Danish graphic artist whose cat has run away. The missing cat prompts the narrator to muse over Stein’s famous description of her cohort as a “lost generation,” the narrator’s inability to locate Stein as a subject, and the modernity Stein helped fashion. Much of the novel consists of brief biographical glimpses into the lives of Stein and the artists and thinkers in her orbit—William James, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, and many others—along with extracts from Stein’s self-described “clear as mud” texts. Levy’s attempt to draw a connection between Stein’s milieu and the narrator’s friendships feels a little forced, but the novel comes alive in the narrator’s riveting efforts to grapple with Stein’s idiosyncratic life and work. There’s much to admire. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (June)