Reviews of two new books. A French Affair, The Paris Beat 1965-1998 by Mary Blume Illustrations by Ronald Searle (The Free Press, 279 pages, $24) AMERICAN GUSTO Mary Blume, weekend feature writer for the International Herald Tribune, fled to Paris in the early 1960s, leaving America because "the food had no flavor, the automobiles were too pillowy, the light too harsh." Armed with nothing more than terrible typing skills, youth and inexperience, she arrived in an aloof and gray Paris where nobody smiled. "The Parisians who had spent their youth under the Occupation," Blume writes, "seemed lethargic, ill at ease and enclosed." Her weekly columns for the Tribune, collected here as A French Affair, reveal a young American writer observing and skewering everything from the social rigidity of Charles de Gaulle-era Paris to the culturally liberating student uprisings of May 1968. Blume's essays are free of the usual cloying reporter's presence--the writer's touch is sharp and fine as an X-acto blade as she lightly slices and dices the often contradictory national personality, all the way through 1998. Topics range from Coco Chanel to the infinite bureaucracy required to change a Paris street name, "AW15" (so ugly the mailman wouldn't go there), to the much preferred "Rue André Gide." In one disarmingly honest interview, filmmaker François Truffaut reveals, "I was always on the side of the those who were hooted at rather than the hooters." In another, Blume visits 80-year-old Janet Flanner, author of the New Yorker's famous Letter from Paris column. About Flanner's column, Blume writes: "There is American gusto but there is also French rigor, and above all there is the very French combination of pure reason mixed with melodrama." For any who have ever had a love-hate relationship with France, this collection will be an affair to remember. Michaela Lowthian Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World by Sarah Vowell (Simon & Schuster, 219 pages, $23) This American Life has moved to 10 am Saturdays on Oregon Public Broadcasting, KOPB 91.5 FM. TILTING AT WINDMILLS People who had normal childhoods are at a terrible disadvantage when it comes to being artists or writers. These days the Muse only puts out for serious trauma--beatings, incest, hideous poverty. If you don't have anything awful to confess, you'd better invent it, or forget about making a career of expressing your inner demons. It's hard to be a tragic hero when your life is basically not that bad. Public-radio cutie Sarah Vowell (from This American Life) has no ugly secrets, no inspiring damage eating away at her psyche, so instead she dissects the humiliation of being in the high-school marching band; the tragedy of having Republicans in her immediate family; the epic challenge of getting her driver's license at age 28. She coaxes wild adventures out of the mundane details of her totally normal existence. And she's pretty good at it. "Suddenly," she writes, in a piece about learning to drive, "our lane appears...narrow and fraught with danger. My beautiful city of orderly boulevards and responsible fellow citizens has turned into some film noir back alley where you can't trust a soul, where even the parked cars look like they're packing heat and they don't care who knows." Take the Cannoli is full of molehills dressed as mountains. Example: Vowell is adorable-looking, which irritates her, because inside, she's fierce and very, very tough. She is dying to look as menacing as she feels. ("Is it too much to ask to make strangers nervous? To look shady and untrustworthy and malcontented?") So she gets a goth makeover, including the requisite all-black wardrobe, sad soundtrack and new goth name. ("The most perverse name I can think of is Becky," she confides. Hmph.) She goes to a club. Not much happens, but it seems absolutely gripping. It's not easy turning windmills into evil giants. But a good storyteller can make an epic saga from a trip to Safeway. Vowell lends Cosmo-caliber material the dignity and relevance of something you might read in Harper's. She writes so compellingly that you barely notice how trivial this stuff is. She makes insomnia seem deeply tragic, drive-through fast-food seem a noble pursuit. There are exceptions. Her writing fails when she forgets that the giants really are windmills after all. Her attempts to draw profound conclusions from her invented adventures sound corny and strained ("What if all those years my mom wanted to do just this--sit me down and fiddle with my hair--not because she wanted to torture me...[but] to show me that she loves me?"). And many of the stories suffer without Vowell's second-grade voice adding its weird emphasis. (Her essay on what she hoped TV producers would not do when Sinatra died was heartwrenching on radio, but a little flat on the page.) Still, the way she wrings drama out of the ordinary should inspire those of us who are tragically normal. Becky Ohlsen     - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published April 26, 2000