There seemed to me to be a significant shift in the tone and interest of the narrator, Renee Michel, the dowdy concierge. Until her inadvertent revelation to Kakuro Ozu, her "hedgehog-ness" was what had drawn me to her. This prickliness was what made her and her fellow confessee, Paloma Josse, the 12 year old genius, so intriguing and, for me at least, attractive.
As the novel drew on though, and the two of them revealed themselves to one another, and to others around them, that tension ebbed. Paloma's trenchant questions about life and meaning nearly evaporate into quaint observations as she sits in the easy-chair in Renee's apartment. In this context, escorted there by her mother, she is reduced to her 12-year-oldness. She looks and sounds young again as we watch her dangle her legs and fidget.
Similarly, Renee's former discussions of things of beauty and reason in the world around her, are replaced by concerns about hairstyles, dresses, and pastries. Strangely, a woman who has, to this point taken great pains to free herself of the classist concerns of appearances, becomes the focus - initially unwilling, to be fair - of a kind of makeover. The story shifts from a focus on the beauty of order and simplicity - in grammar, music, ideas - to an awakening love of self, as she is seen, and comes to see herself, through the eyes of the other, Kakuro Ozu. Indeed Renee learns to love herself, because Ozu comes to love her. It becomes the ideal transformational love story.
What's wrong with this? Good question. Nothing really, except for the ending. You see, as soon as Renee comes to accept and love her new self (and apparently let go of her alter-ego, a deceased sister who's foray into the city results in rape and death in childbirth has haunted her - "You are not your sister," says Ozu), she comes to suffer the same fate. She is killed by her own naivete, in the city. Certainly running into traffic, and being struck by a dry cleaning van as one attempts to rescue a vagrant from traffic, is a reasonably noble way to die, but it is also mock-heroic and non-sensical, in a novel that has, up till now, taken great pains to make sense of things.
Of course life is like that. Shit happens, as they say. But this novel has been approaching the altar of high art - a religion of order and structure. It has invoked classics of music, philosophy, and literature. In fact, it is almost certain that Barbery intends Renee's death to parallel, or at least conjure, the death of Anna Karenina in Tolstoy's novel, which is often referenced in this story. The haphazard nature of Renee's demise leaves me cold. If it is to be tragic, I don't see the lesson in it. Rather Renee deserves better, not worse. Her death does not stand as a warning for the higher classes who disdain common folk, or, as in Tolstoy, those who would disdain a woman's right to choose. And even as we struggle to see Renee's death as something other than accident, she ascribes it to "the paths of God" that are "all to explicit for those who pride themselves in the ability to decipher them." Really? That is God? So we are just to accept this as "fate" we lie dying; that God makes shit happen. Amen?
From a novelist who has, for much of her story, found exquisite beauty and meaning in the mundane, I find suggesting that this fatalistic conclusion is the result of the hand of God a bit of a cheat. What purpose does it serve except to bring the most abrupt closure to a plot that wasn't the point of the novel anyway? At its core this novel seeks to play the notes of psychological (who am I) and political (class-ism) tension and harmony. The ending fails to illuminate those further. In fact Paloma's bourgeois mother hardly flinches at the news. This non-reaction jars as much as Renee's invocation of god. The classed, atheist universe will trundle along, unmarked by this baser matter.
So it goes.
The ride in: Temp 4'C Wind 20 ks ESE
The ride home: Temp 8'C Wind 35 ks ESE
It will be rain tonight.
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