The Paris Novel is the first novel by food writer, memoir author, food critic, and James Beard award-winner Ruth Reichl. It's a fairytale-like love letter to Paris in which a staid young woman has almost magical encounters with food, fashion, and kind strangers, which collectively and dramatically shape her future.
Stella is practical, frugal, regimented, and independent. A copyeditor who lives by a careful daily schedule, she is thrown for a loop when her estranged, impulsive, selfish mother dies and leaves her an unusual inheritance: a one-way plane ticket with the directive "Go to Paris."
She's tempted to defy her mother by not following her bossy demands, but when Stella arrives in Paris, a series of fortuitous encounters with French fashion, food, caring characters, and her own past make for a sweet story.
The novel's eating and vivid French food descriptions are, as one would expect from Reich, a fun highlight--and also a pivotal part of her self-discovery and her future. Fashion also turns out to be a key to Stella's fate, and French designs are highlighted within The Paris Novel and given an almost magical power. The relationships that seem problematic or fated to fail each turn out to be essential to Stella's happiness and part of a found family that propels her forward into a more rich, full life.
With the exception of her fraught past relationship with her mother--as well as a haunting (and for me, surprisingly dark) element to the story, an occurrence in Stella's childhood that happened due to her mother's self-obsession and lack of supervision--there's no doubt everything is going to work out on all fronts for Stella in this novel. Convenient encounters, fairytale-like turns of events, and decadent experiences with food and fashion are fun, heartwarming, and light, and make for a satisfyingly clean wrap-up of all conflicts.
I listened to The Paris Novel as an audiobook.
I'd love to hear your Bossy thoughts about this book!
This is Ruth Reichl's first novel. Her wonderful food-focused memoirs Garlic and Sapphires and Tender at the Bone were both listed in my Greedy Reading List of Six Foodie Memoirs to Whet Your Appetite, and you can find my review of Save Me the Plums, her memoir about heading up Gourmet magazine, here.
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