The Monuments of Paris

Huisman follows The Book of Mother with a mostly spellbinding but occasionally stultifying autofiction about her paternal lineage. It begins in the early days of Covid-19, after the unnamed narrator and her family have left Brooklyn for a cottage Upstate. They then move to France to be closer to her dying father, Denis. The narrator originally left France for New York at 19. Now, in her 40s, she attempts to make sense of her history by sifting through memories of her father, a colorful academic and womanizer. Many of Denis’s own memories revolve around his father, Georges, founder of the Cannes film festival and once director-general of the Beaux-Arts administration of the Third Republic, whose titles were stripped due to antisemitism in the 1940s. After Denis dies in early 2021, the narrator contacts her half brother, Bruno, as well as Béatrice, a graduate student who wrote about Georges for her dissertation, to learn more about Georges and his mistress Choute. Later sections on Georges’s life lack the punch of the novel’s first half, in which Huisman brilliantly toggles through time, often structuring her narrative as a direct address to Denis (“You fall asleep mid-sentence. I enjoy watching you at rest”). Despite its flaws, this offers an enthralling view into a family’s mysteries. (Apr.)