The Beautiful American (41 page)

A. I revisited Grasse when I was working on this novel. It’s such a beautiful place, one of my favorite French towns. And yes, they still think of themselves as the perfume capital, and with reason. They are still surrounded by fields of lavender and have several museums of perfume history.

Whether the artificial scents have improved or not is a matter of opinion. Certainly many essences are easier and cheaper to replicate, so good perfume is more affordable. What I found
fascinating is that plants, like wines, have vintages and will vary from year to year, depending on the soil, weather, and other growing conditions. Fragrance formulas have to be continuously reworked to maintain consistency so that, say, Chanel No. 5 made in 2014 smells like the Chanel No. 5 made in 2001.

Q. You make postwar France sound almost as dangerous as during the war. Can you tell us more about reprisals imposed on ordinary people for aiding and abetting the enemy in Occupied France?

A. People tend to think the war ended when peace was declared. In fact, the hunger, the rationing, the shortages, the upheavals, lasted for years after. The violence lasted as well, not in the form of battles but in retribution. Estimates vary, but in France alone hundreds of people may have been shot by snipers or knifed in the dark by people wanting revenge, especially against those thought or known to have been collaborators. This included women who had slept with enemy soldiers, and in dozens of towns women had their heads shaved; many were stripped naked and marched through the streets. Men felt emasculated by the war and the Vichy government; they reclaimed their manhood by punishing women and assassinating the collaborators. Thousands of people were put on trial for the crime of collaboration or simply for being insufficiently patriotic. Pétain himself was sentenced to life in prison. The Europeans had to rebuild their relationships, their towns, their countries, and this took time.

Q. Can you tell us a little about your background as a writer? Have particular writers influenced your work?

A. When I was a kid, I read indiscriminately. Everything. My parents didn’t look over my shoulder at the titles, and my father even joked that I read books by the pound. He used to read Victorian poems out loud in the evenings: “The Face upon the Floor,” “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight,” “The Raven,” “Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” . . . those great old story poems. I went to Catholic school, and the nuns raised a few eyebrows over some of the books I chose to do book reports on. My grandmother’s house had a small library full of the classics: Zane Grey, the Tarzan books, some weird and wonderful books about Victorian spiritualism. I would curl up there for hours at a time. I was, and remain, totally impressed that my grandparents, who raised ten kids in a small house, kept a room just for books and reading. I’ve read everything by Daphne du Maurier and Anya Seton, Dickens and Hawthorne. Popular authors like Romain Gary and Paul Gallico were a major influence when I was first mapping my way through my own fiction. I like the great storytellers, the narrative writers. Must be because of those great Victorian poems.

Q. You live in a rural area of upstate New York. What role, if any, does geography play in your writing life?

A. Geography helps form character, doesn’t it? Our families, our historical settings, our inherent nature and personality, and then the world immediately around us, our geography, make us who
we are, I think. I grew up in the country, at the edge of a small town, and I can’t imagine what my childhood would have been like without trees big enough to climb, mud puddles up to my shins, robins’ nests in the bushes, and snowdrifts up to my waist. My childhood made me a daydreamer, able to get lost in my own thoughts and be quite content with my own company—key ingredients for a writer. My writing room, now, is on the second floor with windows all around and trees outside the windows, kind of like being in a big treehouse.

Q. Where do you keep the pile of books you hope to read soon, and what titles are in it?

A. I love this question! I do have piles of books all over the house. Ask my husband, who patiently goes around and places bookmarks in them for me, since I’m usually reading four or five simultaneously and I tend to leave them open, like huge butterflies, on top of all the furniture. My reading right now includes research for the next novel: histories, biographies, memoirs. Research is a great adventure for me. Pleasure reading at the moment is
The Discovery of Middle Earth
by Graham Robb, about the ancient Celts. I regularly reread two titles that are masterpieces of historical fiction:
The Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys, and
The Passion
by Jeanette Winterson. My book group just finished the
Old Filth
trilogy by Jane Gardam and we were all delighted by it. I’m still reading books by the pound.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What did you most enjoy about the novel? What do you think you will remember about it many months from now?

2. When Nora and Lee play together as children, Lee is the more daring. During your own childhood, were you more like Nora or Lee? Discuss the dangerous risks that Lee takes during the novel. Does she pay a price for her boldness? Is great risk-taking necessary for great achievement?

3. If the friendship between Nora and Lee lies at the heart of the novel, what kind of friendship is it? How does it evolve over time? Discuss the ways in which they each betray the other, yet also save each other.

4. In the author’s portrayal of ardent young love between Nora and Jamie, what details make their romance come alive for you? Why do you think Jamie betrays Nora? Is Nora right or wrong in not telling him about her pregnancy? Compare the Nora/Jamie
relationship with the Lee/Man Ray relationship. Is one love more “true” than the other?

5. Discuss how Lee’s childhood rape might have shaped her adult attitude toward sex and emotional intimacy. What other factors might have also contributed to her unconventional beliefs? Do you consider her behavior liberated or pathological?

6. Like the main character in Woody Allen’s movie
Midnight in Paris
, do you wish you could have lived in Paris in the 1920s? Do you consider our own time inferior to the past, and if so, in what ways?

7. Discuss the mother/child relationships in the novel—Nora and her mother, Nora and Dahlia, and Lee and Anthony. How is Natalia also a mother to Nora? Who among them is the “good” mother?

8. Jamie never finds artistic recognition for his photography and ends up back in Poughkeepsie taking pictures of local events. Does he consider himself a failure? Do you? Discuss the role that changing taste plays in keeping him from success. Do you know an artist of any kind whose work is currently out of favor but who is perhaps worthy of recognition?

9. As a model, Lee seems to be aware of how photographs objectify her beauty and turn her into something that isn’t fully real or female. Discuss how she and Man Ray explore this idea in their art and in their life together (for example, at Lee’s party). At
the end of the novel, are there indications that Lee has moved beyond this subject?

10. Lee describes photographing the Nazi death camps and taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub. What do you think the bath signifies for her?

11. What does the panther in the Paris zoo represent for Nora?

12. Do you have a signature scent? Would Nora think it suits
you?