Finished Sa 12/14/19 The December, 2019 selection for the Contemporary Book Club.
The book is somewhere between 'charming' and 'annoying'. I could go either way.
Reminded me of J.D. Salinger's 'The Glass Family'; NINE STORIES, RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, FRANNY AND ZOOEY, CARPENTERS AND SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION.
The novel is set in France, but it could have been set in Ohio or anywhere. None of the characters or the feel of the novel didn't evoke anything that was particularly French.
Isidore Mazal- the protagonist, 11 years old. The youngest of all the children.
***Bernice- the oldest and a PHD candidate. Gets a French one, and goes to Chicago for another. Was slated to be a teacher, but hides out in Paris and doesn't tell anyone what she's done.
***Aurore- also a PHD candidate. Gets pregnant.
***Jerome- composer and cello player. Certain musical passages make him laugh.
***Leonard- Writing a thesis about Loss and Family. It turns into an expose of The Mazal's.
***Simone- closest in age to Izzie (Dorry) and wants him to write her biography.
Mother- is devastated by the loss of 'The Father', Leaves his clothes in the closet with the door open. Wants Dorry to read to her. She isn't interested in content, but only his speaking voice.
'The Father'- this is the way he is always referred to. Knocked his teeth out falling down at work. Wears a suit to work and travels a lot. Had a painless heart attack and died suddenly.
Rose- Simone's pen pal, yet she ignores Rose and bonds with Dorry. Bad spelling, but speaks her heart.
"With How to Behave in a Crowd, Camille Bordas immerses readers in the interior life of a boy puzzled by adulthood and beginning to realize that the adults around him are just as lost. A witty, heartfelt novel that brilliantly evokes the confusions of adolescence and marks the arrival of an extraordinary young talent".
From the book's page on Amazon:
"Isidore Mazal is eleven years old, the youngest of six siblings living in a small French town. He doesn't quite fit in. Berenice, Aurore, and Leonard are on track to have doctorates by age twenty-four. Jeremie performs with a symphony, and Simone, older than Isidore by eighteen months, expects a great career as a novelist—she's already put Isidore to work on her biography. The only time they leave their rooms is to gather on the old, stained couch and dissect prime-time television dramas in light of Aristotle's Poetics.
Isidore has never skipped a grade or written a dissertation. But he notices things the others don't, and asks questions they fear to ask. So when tragedy strikes the Mazal family, Isidore is the only one to recognize how everyone is struggling with their grief, and perhaps the only one who can help them—if he doesn't run away from home first.
Isidore’s unstinting empathy, combined with his simmering anger, makes for a complex character study, in which the elegiac and comedic build toward a heartbreaking conclusion. With How to Behave in a Crowd, Camille Bordas immerses readers in the interior life of a boy puzzled by adulthood and beginning to realize that the adults around him are just as lost".
Some questions to the author at Amazon:
"A Conversation with Camille Bordas, Author of 'How To Behave In A Crowd'
Q. Tell us about your inspiration for 'How To Behave In A Crowd.'
How to Behave in a Crowd doesn’t exactly rely on a big idea or concept, but more on its characters. I never have big ideas come to me out of nowhere. Or if I have one, it’s usually a bad sign—I get a little crushed by it and give up fast. For me, the writing of a novel often starts with a little voice I like and want to keep playing with. As far as the notion of 'inspiration' goes, I’m a firm subscriber to Picasso’s idea that inspiration is not really something you can count on, or that eventually will come to you from above or wherever, but that it is something that finds you at work. When I write, I never know in advance what’s going to happen, and you could say that what 'inspires' a sentence is nothing other than the one (or the few) that just preceded it. Sentence after sentence, narrative possibilities are either opening or closing, and part of my job is to be open to and keep track of them so that I can write the best possible version of my book. The problem with saying that the only things that inspire a new sentence are the ones I wrote before, though, is that you’re going to ask me, “Sure, but what about the very first sentence of the book, then? If all the others just stemmed from it, where did the first one come from?” and now I’m cornered. I don’t have a clever answer. It so happens that the very first page I wrote of this book ended up being the first of the finished novel as well, so I guess, in retrospect, that the day I wrote it ended up being pretty defining, but I don’t remember much about it. At the time, that first page was just a little thing I scribbled, an observation about suede that I decided for some reason to write down in the voice of a child. This first page describes something apparently trivial (there’s a stain on the family couch, but nobody knows who’s responsible for it, what it is a stain from, or when exactly it was made) and yet it is extremely important to the narrator, Isidore. It’s a page that introduces six core characters, Isidore and his five older siblings, by showing that the five eldest in question can’t even agree on something as small and meaningless as the author of a stain. It also presents Isidore—who is the only one to not have an idea about it because he was too young at the time the stain was made to remember—as dependent on his siblings for all kinds of information, big and small. The rest of the book covers about three years in Isidore’s life and goes in all sorts of directions, but it came out of Isidore’s character in that particular moment. I liked his obsession with this small thing that nobody around him seemed to care about.
Q. This is your first novel written in English. How did you come to the decision to write in English, and was the process different from writing in your native French?
I moved to the United States a few years ago and have barely spoken French to anyone since then. I speak French when I go back to France once a year, or on the phone with my mother, but other than that, English pretty much took over my life. In the end, writing in English wasn’t a big decision I made. It happened quite naturally. Weirdly, I didn’t find the process of writing a novel in English that much different than writing a novel in French. That’s probably because I see the process of writing a novel pretty much exactly as Doctorow describes it, as being similar to driving at night in the fog: you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. It makes the process seem both vertiginous and not at the same time. You never know where you are or where exactly you’re headed, but the way to get there is one sentence at a time, so that’s a manageable unit—and that’s how I wrote this novel, same as I would’ve written it in French, one sentence at a time. Obviously, having not grown up speaking English but having learned it in my late teens, there will always be words or phrases that I won’t only not know, but also not know that I don’t know, so that can be a little paralyzing if I think about it too much. Having a smaller vocabulary and fewer references at my disposal can also be a good thing, I think. I guess it can all be either extremely freeing or frustrating, depending on the kind of day I’m having. I have fewer tools than a native speaker, for sure, but I make do with what I’ve got. I know you don’t necessarily need gigantic means to reach big emotional effects. To riff on the Doctorow image, I feel that not being a native English speaker only means that my headlights are maybe a little dimmer than those of an American writer, but in a way that might be advantageous: it forces me to be even more focused and precise.
Q. The protagonist of 'How To Behave In A Crowd', Isidore Mazal, is eleven years old. How did writing the adults in the story differ from writing the children? Was one easier than the other?
Not really. I’m an adult now, so you might think it would require extra effort to put myself in the shoes of a preteen, but I actually remember being Isidore’s age quite vividly. I have learned a lot of things since then of course, but I actually don’t feel that much smarter than I was then.
Q. What do you hope readers will take away from 'How To Behave In A Crowd?'
I hope they take away a good memory of reading it, and a desire to maybe read it again down the line. I write books because I love books, and I don’t think the books that I love try to send me a message. I don’t really learn or expect to learn lessons from a novel. A good novel to me is time out from the world. It’s pretty precious.
Q. You recently published a short story in The New Yorker. How is your process different when writing a short story versus writing a novel?
I don’t know that I can really talk about it much because I have only written that one story. But what I can say is that, in writing it, there was more of a sense of urgency than in writing my novels. When I write novels, I tend to let myself explore and go to the (sometimes dead-) end of things. I’m always telling myself, We’ll see when the first draft is done whether this stays or not. But with the story, I was watching myself more. If I started writing a description of a room, for instance, I would ask myself right away, Well, does it matter to the story, the colors of the wall? and decide right then and there if it did or didn’t. A story is obviously easier to edit as you go. You can read the whole of it many times in a day of work, keep it in your head... You’re convinced that you could finish it any day, also, which is not the case with a novel. Writing that story was pretty intense, because it felt kind of like the last few weeks of writing a novel. You know you’re close to finishing, so that’s very exciting, but you also try to not get carried away, because any sentence could be the last, so you have to be extra careful.
Q. Who are some of the writers, or what are some of the books, that have most influenced you?
I never really understand what people mean by 'influence.' There are many, many, books that I love, but I’ve never necessarily felt that I was writing in the lineage of any of them in particular. That might be because I always read novels for pleasure and not for school or work. I never studied literature or writing; I never thought of dissecting a book I loved to see what made it work; I never deliberately riffed on or copied a writer I loved as an exercise, as I hear some American writers do in the course of their education. It just never crossed my mind. But surely I must have been influenced by writers I love, right? I don’t know which ones, though. I mean, one of my favorite books of all time is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but I challenge anyone to see its influence on my work... Same goes for Nabokov’s Ada or Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Patrick deWitt and George Saunders make me laugh out loud, but I don’t feel at all like I’m in their lineage. I love Harry Crews’s Gypsy’s Curse, but unfortunately I could never come up with such a book. There are authors whose worldview I feel close to, though, like José Emilio Pacheco, Akhil Sharma, J. D. Salinger, Joan Didion, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lydia Davis, Édouard Levé, or Emmanuel Carrère (all of them very different from one another, by the way, but I guess every reader makes his or her own connections between writers, and I can sort of link them all somehow). I also read a lot of sociology, and I tend to believe that every writer (or maybe everyone, actually) should read Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life".
Link to The National Book Review of the novel:
https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2017/11/8/review-a-young-french-boy-trapped-in-a-large-and-precocious-family
Link to NPR review of the book:
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/16/542469075/an-oddball-family-that-cant-connect-in-how-to-behave-in-a-crowd
Numerious links to reviews of the book:
https://www.google.com/search?q=camille+bordas+how+to+behave+in+a+crowd+a+novel&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS851US851&oq=how+to+behave+in+a+crowd+novel&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0.6992j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Link to the book's page at GoodReads:
***I posted a question about the fight between Izzie and Porfi. Why did Victor join in on Izzie's side?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31951323-how-to-behave-in-a-crowd?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=LV40CHe0ob&rank=1
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