The Paris Secret
They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but my years in the marketing industry taught me the shameful truth that a book is always judged by its cover. That’s why I assumed I knew what I was getting into when I cracked open Nicola Rayner’s The Paris Dancer (Aria, 2025), whose book jacket features a beautiful young woman set against a backdrop of clear blue sky, the Eiffel Tower, and an elegant Haussmannian building. The woman wears pearl earrings, red lipstick, and an emerald-colored cape, and she looks dramatically over her shoulder. The subtitle reads, “In the city of light, she was a beacon of hope.” A classic airport novel, then, one of those breezy reads that relies on its charming protagonist and equally charming setting to make up for a less-than-thrilling plot. Well, reader, in some ways, I was right. But in others, I was all wrong.
To begin with, The Paris Dancer is not really about a Paris dancer. The story opens in modern-day Manhattan, where a young woman named Miriam (Mim for short) has arrived from England in order to sort out the affairs of her recently deceased great aunt Esther. Mim is many things — awkward, riddled with grief, and seeking answers to a dark past — but she is decidedly not the novel’s titular character. In fact, the last time she danced, we learn, was at a nightclub in Brighton, where she awkwardly jumped and shimmied to the macarena. Hey!
When Mim comes across her great aunt’s old notebooks, we begin to follow the second strand of the story, which employs the dual-timeline technique so popular with historical fiction, and focuses on Esther’s years in wartime Paris. Esther is not the Paris dancer, either, but rather a simple usherette working at the famous Bal Tabarin, a dance hall in Pigalle. When the Nazis occupy Paris, Esther and her sisters, Lili and Rebecca, seek refuge in the Bal’s backstage, earning their keep by day and staying out of the Nazis’ sight by night. It is here, under the stage lights of the Tabarin, that Esther meets Annie, bringing us finally — 50 pages in — to our titular Paris dancer.
Annie Mayer, one of the Tabarin’s star dancers, is charismatic and beautiful. She’s also harboring a dark secret: Annie is Jewish. What the novel lacks in originality it makes up for — to some extent — in authenticity; Annie’s character is heavily inspired by a real woman named Sadie Rigal who danced at the Tabarin in the ’30s and participated in the Resistance. Where Sadie was South African, Annie is Canadian. Where Sadie changed her name to Florence Waren to hide her Jewish identity, Annie becomes Amélie (a switch that occurs after 240 pages and caused me much confusion. Where had Annie gone? I found myself asking. And who on earth was this new chick, Amélie?). But both women were sent on a European tour as part of a dancing duo, both women were favorites of Pierre Sandrini, the Bal Tabarin’s director and owner, and both women put their own lives at risk in order to participate in acts of Resistance: hiding weapons for fellow Resistance members, shepherding Jews from one safe house to another, and smuggling letters for loved ones across borders. And yet, for all that Sadie, a.k.a. Annie, has the makings of an incredible leading lady, The Paris Dancer keeps its narrative laser-focused on Mim and Esther’s personal dramas. Apparently budding love, guilty secrets, and past regrets make for better reading than a talented dancer who risked her own life to help others.
Was this book actually about a dancer in Paris? Not really. Was it “a heart-wrenching tale of resistance,” as promised on the back cover? Frankly, I never expected it to be. But did I still read to the end in order to find out what happened to Esther’s sister Lili, and why Esther couldn’t seem to forgive herself for it? Was I curious about the tragedy that befell Mim’s best friend, and was I eager to see if Mim might let love back into her heart by way of her quirky American suitor, Lucky? You bet I did. And, in a plot twist that even I — ex-marketer that I am — did not anticipate, the book managed to teach me a valuable lesson that extended well beyond the book’s pages, though I only realized it well after the fact.
When my editor first wrote saying he had a story for me, it sounded exciting, shrouded in mystery and intrigue. Would I need my own pearl earrings for this assignment, an emerald cape, perhaps? He agreed to meet me for lunch at the American Library in Paris, on the western edge of town. The American Library is the largest English-language lending library in continental Europe, and a historical institution by its own right. Founded in 1920, in the aftermath of WWI, the library’s motto is Atrum post bellum, ex libris lux: After the darkness of war, the light of books. In its early years, the library was championed by literary giants such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Edith Wharton served as one of the library’s first trustees. During WWII, the staff ran a daring underground operation that provided books to Jewish members after the Nazis banned them from libraries. Today, it’s a peaceful and welcoming space in the 7th arrondissement, and has been my writing home for the past two years.
My editor and I grabbed five-euro sandwiches from the boulangerie on the corner, then strolled the neighborhood’s tree-lined streets, handsome buildings rising up on either side of us, and the outline of the Eiffel Tower cutting through the bright blue sky.
“So,” my editor said, through a mouthful of sandwich au thon. “I’d like you to figure out what the deal is with these books.”
By ‘these books’ he meant The Paris Dancer, but also its numerous contemporaries, for Rayner’s novel is just one among a plethora, he informed me — works of women’s historical fiction revolving around Occupation-era Paris that have been hitting bookstores at breakneck pace. Since 2020, dozens of similar titles have been churned out by major publishing houses like Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Hachette. (The Paris Dancer is published by Aria, a commercial imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.)
Why are these books so popular, my editor wanted to know? Why are they all structured and marketed in precisely the same way? And why now, when the last witnesses and survivors of WWII are fading away and the authoritarian ideologies and practices from that bygone era are making an undeniable resurgence in American politics?
As my erudite editor spoke, I nodded, already forming a marketer’s hunch in my mind (it’s the economy, stupid). Conversation paused as we dodged a group of tourists donning visors and wielding selfie sticks, oohing and aahing in unison at the sight of the iron lady rising behind us. Once we’d safely passed them, my editor concluded that he wanted to know whether these books were at all in dialogue with the political and social realities of the day, or if they were simply proof that people will buy anything having to do with Paris.
Let’s hope it’s not as vapid as that! we laughed, though I think we both already feared it was.
Back in front of the library, I told my editor I’d take the story, and he pulled a shiny new copy of The Paris Dancer from his Shakespeare & Co. tote.
“Keep it,” he said, handing it to me with pinched fingers, as though it were contagious.
When he walked away, I was left clutching my new book, feeling at once determined to get to the bottom of the story, and also kind of annoyed: my editor wanted me to spend countless hours reading this commercial crap? I have a novel to write, people!
It didn’t take me long to find more of these kinds of novels among the library’s stacks. All I had to do was look for “Paris” in the title and see if the cover looked like an old-time movie poster, and chances were I’d come across yet another one. There was Kelly Bowen’s The Paris Apartment, Kristin Harmel’s The Paris Daughter, Natasha Lester’s The Paris Secret, and Bryn Turnbull’s The Paris Deception. My beloved American Library even had a book dedicated to its own WWII story — Janet Skeslien Charles’ The Paris Library, which recounts how its staff managed to protect not only the library’s books but also its Jewish patrons during the war. But the ‘Paris War Novels’, as I started calling them, didn’t end there. There was also The Dressmaker of Parisby Georgia Kaufmann, which was not to be confused with Kristy Cambron’s The Paris Dressmaker, which must not be mistaken for The Lost Dressmaker of Paris by Suzanne Fortin. Got the spins yet? I haven’t even mentioned the books in which Paris featured in the second half of the title, like Meg Waite Clayton’s The Postmistress of Paris, Suzanne Fortin’s The Dance Teacher of Paris (which she published in the same year as The Lost Dressmaker of Paris), or Aimie K. Runyan’s A Bakery in Paris, just to name a few.
As I pulled these books from the shelves, I began to wonder if the only reason my editor assigned me this piece was because he didn’t know to whom else to hand off a story on women’s historical literature. Did he think I read such books myself? Even worse, did he think my own book could be classified as one of them? That’s when I got mad. Sure, I had spent the last two years writing a novel of historical fiction. And admittedly, my book is also centered around plucky female protagonists who deal with themes of love, family, and self-identity against a backdrop of war. But didn’t my editor know that when I talk about historical fiction, I’m thinking Wolf Hall and Hamnet, just like when I say that I read novels about women, I’m talking Persuasion and The Bell Jar? Now, I’m certainly no Mantel or Austen, but a Paris War Novel author? Excusez-moi, Monsieur!
By the time I returned to the reading room, a tower of Paris War Novels in my arms, my face had set into a defensive pout. I could almost feel the woman a seat over judging me from behind her copy of The Brothers Karamazov. There she was, reading one of the greatest novels of the literary canon, grappling with serious questions of philosophy, religion and morality, while I had to look all superficial and dumb with my collection of pretty protagonists, sexy storylines, and half-serious drama. So I did my best to look serious and academic as, with an upwards tilt of the chin, I cracked open The Paris Dancer and started reading.
Rayner’s opening lines offered little comfort. An unidentified narrator describes the sounds of occupied Paris: “A human cry, protestations of innocence, a shriek of fear. Sounds that left me wide awake, my heart thrumming in the darkness. Waiting until they came for us.” Not exactly Dostoevsky, but I bore on. The next scene cut to Mim on the plane, ugly crying for reasons we ignore. When she looks out the window “there’s nothing out there but darkness. It’s a metaphor, she tells herself, and snaps it shut again.” At this, I groaned — did Rayner hold her readers in such low esteem that she deemed it necessary to signal the use of a literary device? Ouch (that’s an onomatopoeia for you, but you surely knew that).
The novel did not get better as it went along. The chapters in New York leave us as starved of plot as Mim is starved for answers about her great aunt’s past. Even Bibi, the elderly woman living above Esther’s apartment, who regales Mim with stories of her great aunt while sipping martinis from her pink armchair, her dog on her lap, does little to quell the feeling that we’re growing bored here in Manhattan (and how often does that happen!). “I would close that book for a while,” Bibi advises Mim, when the younger woman knocks on her door with more questions. “Go for picnics, go on dates, go dancing. [...] After all, [...] do you want to read about the war when New York is out there, waiting for you?” Mim puts the book down (lucky girl) and goes dancing with a boy named (pun unintended) Lucky. Nerdy-handsome and awkward, Lucky is not your quintessential love interest, but then again, Mim is no ordinary leading lady. She has the distinction of being the first woman I’ve ever met who’s “always had a weakness for braces.” By the end of the novel, we finally uncover what’s been gnawing at Mim’s conscience since the start: she reveals that her best friend died because she followed Mim into the ocean one night. Lucky consoles Mim before the two share one last dance. “For a few minutes, it’s just the two of them and, even though they’re dancing the salsa, it feels as sad as a final tango.”
Esther’s half of the story, with its descriptions of the vibrant Bal Tabarin and its velour-covered elegance, may be more charming, but remains just as formulaic and cringe. When she first meets Annie, Esther is reading Colette “for the millionth time,” and wearing slacks. “Would you believe it wasn’t actually legal for women to wear pants back then in France?” Esther writes. “But if Colette could wear trousers, I always thought, then so could I.” If Rayner was trying to make Esther seem interesting and audacious, she quickly gave up. For the rest of the novel, Esther splits her time between pining for Annie — who’s busy being a Résistante — and worrying about her sister Lili, who’s begun taking pictures in secret of German activity. Esther, meanwhile, doesn’t really do anything. Even though she eventually writes pamphlets of ‘anti-German propaganda’, there are no actual scenes of her doing this, nor are we given the how and the why of it.
Much like Esther’s participation in the Resistance, the horrors of the war and Nazi occupation are largely left untouched, quickly mentioned and rarely explored in detail. The girls’ parents go missing, the father taken prisoner in a work camp, and their mother disappears from the Pletzl, Paris’ Jewish neighborhood, one night, but Esther seems more preoccupied by her unrequited crush on Annie. The girls have to leave their childhood home and go live in the backstage of the Bal Tabarin, but there’s something cozy about sisters sleeping on the same mattress amidst dance costumes and sewing machines. And even the German officers, who’ve invaded Paris and now invade the Bal Tabarin nightly for entertainment, remain on the other side of the curtain; because our protagonists are hiding in the back wings, they do not have to interact with the Nazis and nor, conveniently, do we.
By the end of the book, I couldn’t help feeling that the only reason The Paris Dancer was about Paris and World War II was because Rayner knew that a story combining these two elements would sell. Rayner is, by training, a dance writer, and clearly prefers to talk tango, salsa, and ballet, rather than Nazis, Occupation, and Holocaust. “The world can’t get enough of that era,” Esther once told Mim, before she passed. “God knows why they want to keep returning to it, but it’s bought me my home, I suppose, so I mustn’t complain.” Esther —cough, cough, Rayner — might not be complaining, but I, who still had a tower of these books to get through, most definitely was.
In many ways, to read one Paris War Novel is to read them all. The protagonists are nearly always pretty young women, with a dash of imperfection — clumsiness, stubbornness, shyness, take your pick — that makes them relatable and all the more charming for it. The protagonist often uncovers a secret, say in a letter or an old suitcase, or sometimes from the lips of a dying relative. In some instances, she’s hiding a secret herself, or struggling with a sense of guilt, usually in relation to a lost love or a lost friend. There’s death, suspicion and suffering — these are war novels, after all — but the authors strain to emphasize the sexy, romantic possibilities opened up by conflict: handsome German officers, letters from separated lovers, forbidden affairs, that kind of thing. And, of course, there’s Paris, as our protagonists’ lives play out against the charming backdrops of a dance hall or a bookstore, a flower shop or a dressmaking atelier. After all, who can resist a nostalgic view of the City of Lights? Surely not the Viviennes, Mireilles and Charlottes of these novels. No coincidence, perhaps, that the Paris War Novels started flourishing in 2020, the same year Netflix’s Emily in Parisdebuted. For the Paris War Novels, like for Emily, Paris is the story. Paris is the point.
As a slight aside, never have I seen so many Charlottes lined up on one shelf. Of course, Charlotte is a very popular name today — over the past decade, it has consistently ranked as one of the most popular girls’ names in the US. But could the same be said of 1940s France? As a fellow writer of historical fiction, I assumed that the authoresses of the Paris novels had done their research. Mais non! I found no trace of Charlotte on the Insée’s list of the Top 100 female names during the interwar years. I had to consult a separate database entirely, the Journal des Femmes, and scroll until #126 to find her, squashed as she was between antiquated Aimée and altogether unheard-of Anny. Could the true reason for Charlotte’s ubiquity, then, be because the authors of these novels, who are almost all white Anglophone women, found Charlotte easiest to pronounce? Or was it just smart marketing, an appeal to the American women who were naming their newborns Charlotte in droves?
But here I go again, scoffing at readers and novels that I am in no place to judge. Nicola Rayner, after all, had a long career as a dance journalist and published two novels before The Paris Dancer came out, including one that was optioned for television. Janet Skeslien Charles’ The Paris Library was a New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today bestseller. Kristin Harmel, who wrote The Paris Daughter, has written more than a dozen novels over her career, which have been translated into over thirty languages. And while these books may be many things — good or bad, historically accurate or not — there is no denying that they sell like hot cakes. Or, as we say in Paris, comme des petits pains.
While sales figures in the publishing industry are notoriously hard to come by, one number that gets cited often is that the average traditionally published book will sell only 3,000 copies in its lifetime. But even that number feels inflated. The Author’s Guild summer 2025 bulletin reports that four out of five books will sell fewer than 100 copies upon release. If a new book sells over 1,000 copies, it’s in the top 6 percent. In order to hit the New York Times bestseller list, you have to sell at least 5,000 copies in bookstores nationwide within the first week, a feat which sounds altogether impossible. Amazon’s rankings are a fickle metric to work with, given they list around 15 million English titles a year, but if we consider that a book in the top 150,000 books is in the top 1 percent, it turns out that a large number of the Paris War Novels are in that exclusive club. Kelly Rimmer’s The Paris Agent is ranked #81,142 among all books, while Jordyn Taylor’s The Paper Girl of Paris is ranked #19,699, and Janet Skeslien Charles’ The Paris Library comes in at #19,440. Although The Paris Dancer has not breached the top 1%, Doron Darmon’s The Parisian Dancer has; published two years before Rayner’s novel, it was also marketed as a “WW2 historical novel based on a true story.” Out of curiosity, I looked up Katie Kitamura’s Audition, which was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Her book is ranked #3,092 amongst all books, which did not surprise me, though I was astonished to discover she had a mere 983 reader ratings, while Rimmer was close to the 3,000 mark, and Charles well over 12,000.
So what is “the deal,” to quote my endlessly eloquent editor? Is there some secret elixir in these Paris War Novels that renders them irresistible to readers and publishers alike? And if so, could I get my hands on some of that magic without having to kowtow to the gods of formulaic slop?
If I sound dismissive of these books, it’s partly because, indeed, the writing is so cheesy it hurts, but also in part because I’ve been taught — as an English major and a quasi-intellectual hipster — not to take such books seriously. Never mind that the authors of these novels tend to be highly educated women with impressive careers in law, education, marketing, and journalism. There is something about women’s fiction that gets dismissed by critics and serious readers alike. But what, exactly? And while we’re at it, what is women’s fiction, anyway?
The genre is tricky to define in the first place, and the reason for its un-serious reputation is equally nebulous. Novelist and popular Substack writer Naomi Kanakia published a piece on the subject, titled “Women’s fiction still gets ignored”. She defines women’s fiction as “books that are targeted towards women and are about serious themes, but which are somehow considered less sophisticated than literary fiction.” Writers like Jodi Picoult (My Sister’s Keeper) and Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine) are not taken seriously because their novels are accessible in style and center around themes of family, relationships, and love. Meanwhile, Meg Wolitzer, who does the same thing, is considered legitimate because she teaches at MFA programs and gets reviewed by The New Yorker. Kanakia takes the bold stance that women’s fiction is often superior to literary fiction. “It’s not universally true,” she writes, “but the average quality is much higher. That’s because women’s fiction is written more plainly — not nearly as pretentious — and it is more attentive to story.” As Kanakia sees it, the only thing placing a book in one category versus another is the agent who decided to pitch it. “Why is that the system?” she asks. “How come there’s no fallback where, if a lot of people like a book, someone goes back and reevaluates it to say, ‘Hey, maybe this book is actually good?’”
I want to agree with Kanakia that the dismissal of women’s fiction is yet another example of the sexism built into our consumerist society. I want to be able to reassure readers that the Paris War Novels aren’t just fancy-free, sexy trash. And yet, at the risk of sounding like a prude, there is an awful lot of sex.
Ruth Druart’s While Paris Slept includes a dramatic scene in which the protagonist, Charlotte (I warned you, didn’t I?) learns that her husband has been charged with kidnapping. Although she doesn’t know where her husband is or if she’ll ever see him again, the man who comes to the house to inform Charlotte of the arrest is a handsome young American police officer with blonde hair and blue eyes. Upon entering her home, he “clutches his cap in front of his groin.” When they sit down at the kitchen table to talk, Charlotte observes him. “I take a sip of water from my own glass. Distracted, I miss my mouth and water drips onto the table.” It’s hard to take such a scene seriously when it feels like Charlotte cares more about her sexual attraction to a complete stranger than the wrongful arrest of her kind-hearted, profoundly decent husband.
Similarly, in Ellen Feldman’s Paris Never Leaves You, Charlotte (no, I’m not kidding) fears for her safety when a German officer begins frequenting the bookstore she works at on Rue de Rivoli. Though he appears to be browsing innocently, she suspects he’s checking for titles on the Nazis’ ‘Otto List’, a 12 page document banning books by or about Jews, and ordering bookstores to surrender all copies for pulping. This Nazi officer turns out not to be an informant, but rather a kind-hearted doctor and, of course, a tender lover. Charlotte and Julian spend the evening hours draped in each other’s arms, out of sight of the big bad Nazis, whom we never actually meet. (Julian himself is spared this descriptor, most often referred to simply as “the officer,” and occasionally the “German” or “boche,” though the latter means little to American readers. In fact, most of the Paris War Novels I read had a habit of using “German” where “Nazi” would be more precise.)
In Natasha Lester’s The Paris Secret, leading lady Skye is an aptly named pilot for the Air Transport Auxiliary, a civilian air service set up by the British during the war. One evening, Skye parties at London’s Embassy Club with her friends. While the others twirl on the dancefloor, drinks in hand, Skye pouts in a corner, smoking a cigarette as she reflects on the nature of war: “She tried to smile, but couldn’t feel the happiness implied by the gesture, couldn’t help wondering how one could dance and laugh and drink when the world was at war. And was it wrong to do so?” The question is legitimate. But where Lester could have lingered on serious questions of morality and relativism, instead the reader is offered an easy out; Skye’s emotional distress comes less from the atrocity of war erupting just beyond the club’s walls and more from the heartache tearing her up inside. She’s pouting, you see, not because the Nazis are blitzing London, but because she’s watching her soulmate dance with another woman.
Trust me, I’m as hopelessly romantic as they come, but even I found myself bothered by these novels’ habit of taking serious themes and reducing them to the longing gazes and aching hearts of unrequited lovers, palliating the raw horrors of war, death and destruction with pretty backdrops and romantic distractions. If this is women’s fiction, is this what women want? Is this what we think war is, a great opportunity to get laid?
When I was still working my way through my pile of Paris War Novels, I grabbed a drink with a friend, Marie Constance. We sat on a busy café terrace and ordered pints of beer, waving our neighbor’s smoke from our faces as we caught up. When I told Marie Constance about the piece I was working on, she asked if I’d heard of Le Barman du Ritz. Her boyfriend, François, had just finished it, she said, and “adored” it.
Published in 2024 by Albin Michel, a major French publisher, Le Barman du Ritz is pitched as the fictionalized story of Frank Meier, a real-life Jewish barman who ran the cocktail bar at the Ritz Hotel during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Much like the Paris War Novels, the novel promised drama, intrigue, and that same familiar backdrop of the City of Lights gone dark. But unlike those books, it was taken seriously by the literary world.
One reason for this is that the author, Philippe Collin, is a big deal. A longtime radio producer at France Inter, the country’s biggest public radio station, he also hosts a history podcast with an audience of 30 million listeners. When Barman came out, Collin was the featured guest on the popular radio program “Les Midis de Culture”, as well as “La Grande Librairie”, a highbrow public television program that discusses new books and reaches a weekly audience of 450,000. In addition, the book was reviewed in major papers like Le Monde, Le Parisien, and Le Nouvel Obs. A month after Barman’s release, it topped bestseller lists, hitting #15 overall in France. In less than six months, it had sold more than 160,000 copies.
Which is not to say that Barman was any better or more serious than some of the other Paris War Novels I read. In fact, in many ways Le Barman du Ritz is to French men what The Paris Dancer is to American women. Replace the charming woman with a sharply dressed man, swap in cocktail ingredients for dance numbers (there were so many cocktail recipes — like the Bijou, the Clipper, and the intriguing Royal Highball — that I began to wonder if Collin had been commissioned by Pernod Ricard), and you’ve got a near-exact replica, only in slightly more looping, verbose form.
But I’m not quoting Kanakia or bringing up Barman to argue that women’s stories never get taken seriously. After all, women make up the dominant reading market for fiction today, and more and more female authors are behind mega-hit titles of commercial and literary fiction alike. But what still perplexes me is why some books by and about women are admired while others are called silly. It can’t all be about sex, can it?
Just before embarking on the Paris War Novels, I read Miranda July’s All Fours, which was published in 2024 by Riverhead Books, Penguin’s literary imprint. Among many accolades it received, All Fours was listed as a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year, a Washington PostNotable Book of the Year, and a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel is also obsessed — and I mean obsessed — with sex. Categorized as autofiction, it tells the story of a woman in the throes of a mid-life, peri-menopausal crisis who decides to embark on a cross-country road trip and ends up instead on a two-week journey of sexual exploration that takes place in a motel room just 30 miles from home. In the sanctity of this anonymous space, the unnamed narrator allows herself to explore unexpressed desires, most of them sexual, most of them revolving around a younger man named Davey.
The novel abounds with graphic sex scenes, some with lovers young and old, but many by herself — the narrator exhibits a zeal for masturbation that would rival even the randiest of teenage boys. At first glance, All Fours has nothing to do with The Paris Dancer, or any other of the Paris War Novels. And yet, both feature female protagonists who question their position in society and the lives they want to live, as well as the relationships they find rewarding in life. Both novels indulge in unexpressed sexual desires, but it seems the game was already rigged in July’s favor, published as she was by the literary imprint of a major publisher and profiled by the likes of The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, The Yale Review, and The Guardian prior to the novel’s release.
To be fair, I don’t think it’s as simple as all that. July’s prose is undeniably well-crafted, with a wry narrative tone and playful overtures that flirt with profundity. When the narrator dances by herself during a party, and catches her husband watching her from across the room, July writes:
At this slight remove all our formality falls away, revealing a mutual and steadfast devotion so tender I could have cried right there on the dance floor. Sure, he’s good-looking, unflappable, insightful, but none of that would mean anything without this strange, almost pious, loyalty between us. Now we both knew to turn away . . . . Other couples might have crossed the room toward each other and kissed, but we understood the feeling would disappear if we got too close. It’s some kind of Greek tragedy, us, but not all told.
It might not be Henry James, but compare that to a passage in The Paris Dancer, in which Mim and Lucky go to a dance class one evening. Mim asks:
“It doesn’t bother you? Being poked and prodded and rearranged all the time?”
“It’s just part of learning.” There’s a flicker of a smile at her impatience. “I know it’s not easy,” [Lucky] adds, “but you can’t avoid the body when you’re dancing.”
“Avoid the body,” she repeats the words more to herself than to him. . . . She hoped that the waltz would be easier than the salsa. Or, at least, that it wouldn’t stir up those bad old fluttery feelings — and the familiar panic when it came to desire. And intimacy. And yes, the reality of having a body.
Call me a snob, but it’s just . . . not the same. July’s writing is also funny. Lines like the following had me laughing out loud:
I walked around and called all the friends I could think of. They were lonely conversations because I could reveal almost nothing about my current situation, so I only asked about them. Some people are authentically like this, always asking another question, dodging anything personal. What a miserable life, or maybe it’s fine for them.
And the novel’s ending revealed a surprising amount of narrative control — despite the chaotic meandering that occurred over the course of the book, I ended with the satisfied feeling that July knew where she was going all along. July’s prose makes women struggling with their sense of self and their role in society seem fresh and interesting in a way the Paris War Novels simply do not. And yet, for all that July’s writing may be more travaillé, as the French say, many of the novel’s characters feel as thin as the cardboard cutouts in the Paris War Novels.
Take, for example, Audra, an older woman who had been Davey’s lover years ago and becomes, in the latter half of the novel, our narrator’s lover. After the two women spend a first night together, our narrator wanders around, marveling at what she’s just lived and learned:
I’d thought the two paths were:
sex with Davey vs. a life of bitterness and regret
But maybe the road split between:
a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising
like this night had been. While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untethered from my age and my femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time.
Audra, who knows no shame about either her aging body or her voracious sexual appetite, acts as a calm foil to our angsty narrator and offers reassurance that she will, eventually, come to understand the world and her place in it. Bibi in The Paris Dancer plays a similar role for Mim, offering a level-headed perspective as the young woman unravels the painful details of her family’s past. In a rare moment of non-self-absorption, Mim asks Bibi about her own family’s experience during the war:
Bibi sighs. “I was the baby, the youngest of five — I was born in 1929, just ten when the war started, fifteen when it ended. It stole my childhood and every single member of my family.”
Mim is reminded again of how unremarkable her own pain is.
“How did you keep on living?”
“You do it day by day, but it never goes away. You just build a life around it.”
As a young(ish) woman with existential questions of my own — am I crazy to try to become a writer? Will I make a massive fool of myself? Have I messed up everything? — I understand the emotional relief of an older woman offering wisdom and comfort to someone young and lost. I guess I just value it more when it comes in an aesthetically pleasing form. So, yes, I’m a snob. And yet, is All Fours all that much deeper, smarter, eye-opening, or brain-expanding than one of the Paris War Novels? I’m not honestly sure. And am I really willing to argue that Rayner would do better to write more like July? When influencers rack up millions of views on TikTok with mind-numbing content, and Hollywood directors take on endless live-action remakes, who am I to tell a writer that her book needs to be bold and new and full of four-syllable words? They have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay, just like anyone else. And, to their credit, they know exactly how to get it. Here’s another telling scene from The Paris Dancer:
“What were you reading?” Lucky asks Mim.
“My great aunt’s memoir — the one I told you about.”
“What’s happening now?”
“A lot of dancing.” She smiles. “Some sex too.”
“Sounds like a bestseller.”
A month or so after taking the story, I met with my editor for coffee.
Ça va? he asked, his eyebrows wrinkling in a way that betrayed a suspicion that I hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Of course, I would have loved to be able to tell him I’d uncovered some riveting secret about these Paris War Novels. I wished I could proclaim that literary fiction had been a sham all along and women’s fiction deserved its long-awaited day in the sun! But, alas, I’d come to no such conclusion, and as I opened my mouth, praying for the improvisational gods to deliver something that sounded on-top-of-it and reassuring, my editor saved me by leaning forward.
“Have you heard of Rose Valland?” he asked.
She was a member of the Resistance, he told me, but a real one. During the Occupation, she worked at the Jeu de Paume, watching as the Nazis looted the museum’s stores and destroyed countless works of art. They burned piles of paintings in the courtyard and carted off tens of thousands more to be sold or destroyed by the Reich. Rose worked quietly in her corner, hiding the fact that she understood German, all the while diligently cataloguing and tracking the movement of Da Vincis and Vermeers, Michelangelos and Manets. In the postwar years, she used her records to help the so-called Monuments Men retrieve much of the stolen art. In 1969, she was granted the Légion d’honneur.
How did she pull it off? Was she plucky and brazen, but also charming, sweet and relatable, like the protagonists in the Paris War Novels? Hardly. Instead, Rose’s strength as a Résistante was that she was “unremarkable enough to fade into the background.” By all accounts, she was an extremely private person, and even a little boring. Not the best material for a fictional protagonist, then. And certainly not someone my editor expected me to have heard of. So it was with some inner glee that I nodded at the mention of her name.
Oh yeah, I said breezily. I know about her.
My editor cocked his head, looking surprised. (Impressed, even, which I found rude.) What I didn’t really feel like admitting was that the only reason I knew about Rose Valland was that one of the Paris War Novels is about her.
Well, not about her, of course, because she isn’t likely to wind up in the tender embrace of one of these not-really-Nazi Julians or Sebastiens or Ernsts. But she does feature as a character in Bryn Turnbull’s The Paris Deception, whose protagonist is the fictional Sophie Brandt, a feisty young woman with full cheeks and blue eyes who left Germany to study art in Paris. Much like a Wes Anderson character, Sophie wears a tweed jacket and carries a handbag, bikes through the Tuileries, and eats mustard sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. She is stubborn and cute and rebuffs the advances of the Nazi officers who have overtaken the Jeu de Paume, where she works as a restorer under the direction of Rose Valland. Valland, for her part, is described in the novel as “tall and plain, with round glasses and graying hair escaping in wisps from a hastily drawn bun.” And although Valland remains confined to the background of Turnbull’s novel, she is the one who puts the story’s events into motion, by recruiting Sophie to help save works of art. That’s how Sophie begins smuggling masterpieces classified as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and bringing them to her sister-in-law, who then uses her talents as an artist to replicate them so that they may be destroyed in place of the originals. Although Sophie plays the lead in the story, without Rose, there would be no story to speak of.
Sure, Sophie is no Rose. Nor is The Paris Dancer’s Annie Mayer exactly like her real-life inspiration, Sadie Rigal. Odile Souchet, the protagonist of The Paris Library, probably has more pizazz than Dorothy Reeder, the director of the library whose real story served as inspiration for the novel and who, like Rose Valland, features in the fictional story as a background character. But is this so bad?
I encountered the same problem with my own novel. Like many of the charming women of the Paris genre, my protagonists were inspired by real women, but with one crucial difference: I met them in real life. I spoke with them, asked them questions, listened to the way they talked and watched as their eyes shifted recalling distant memories of their college years now 50 years past. And while the women I met were dazzling and warm and smart and funny, I admit that I took these very real people and fictionalized them. I transformed each woman into a novelistic creation, a character whom I allowed myself to color in a little darker, more tortured, more innocent or stubborn or naïve or hopelessly romantic — whatever I needed to make the novel work. Because at the end of the day, a historical fiction novel shoulders the double responsibility of teaching the reader about the past all while keeping them entertained, quite literally turning the page, in the present.
“Nothing too sad, nothing too frightening,” The Paris Dancer begins. It’s Mim speaking, as she tries to pick a movie to watch on her flight to New York, but it may as well be a satisfaction guarantee — or your money back! — for the reader. The Paris Dancer is like any other Paris War Novel, in that it does not want to make us suffer. The genre has no interest in plunging our heads into the ice-cold waters of human depravity to say, “keep your eyes open! Look! Really look!” Some could call this laziness, cowardice, even. I just call it knowing your audience.
On a rare afternoon when I wasn’t reading one of the Paris War Novels, I picked up George Saunders’ book on the craft of writing fiction, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I hoped he might have some wisdom to impart to me about problems with my own manuscript, which was in dire need of some TLC. In one of the early chapters, Saunders encourages the writer to think about what questions they are creating in their narrative:
We might think of structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make a good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.
I thought about this in relation to my own novel but drew little more than a fatigued blank, before my mind wandered off, of its own volition, to the Paris War Novels.
I concluded that the questions in these books are of two sorts. The first are melodramatic: Whose baby is it? Is the sister alive or dead? Is she really going to fall in love with that German officer? The second are what I would call “melohistorical”: Did people really eat acorns and pigeons off the street? Did the Nazis really cram Jews by the thousands into train cars headed for Auschwitz?
The historical questions are rhetorical in nature: We already know this really happened. As Rayner writes in The Paris Dancer, “Mim knew about that period. Of course she did. She’d read Anne Frank’s famous diary as a child, and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. She’d studied the Holocaust at school and talked about it at home.” In this sense, we’re all Mim. Even in the rare instances when the writers do try to ram the dark details of history down our throats, they don’t go down easily.
In Paris Never Leaves You, our story about Charlotte’s bookshop and the handsome German officer is momentarily interrupted to teach the reader about that time a high-ranking official “threatened to close down Shakespeare & Company and confiscate all its stock after Sylvia Beach refused to sell him her last copy, or so she said, of Finnegans Wake.” This is followed by a two-page description of important figures in the art world who played both sides of the collaboration game: Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas hiding in the south, under the roof of a notorious anti-Semite, or Pablo Picasso, whose art expressed outrage at the horrors of war even while he entertained Germans in his studio. This slice of real history comes off as an awkward interruption, a distraction from the real story. Yeah, yeah, can we get back to the good stuff please? I need to see if the sexy German officer is going to come back and take Charlotte in his strong arms.
Although the melohistorical questions grant us licence to care, it’s the melodramatic questions that keep us reading. They compel us to turn the page, to finally figure out if the baby is hers or someone else’s, if the love interest is one of the good guys or the bad guys, if a beloved sister or friend made it out alive after all. In the meantime, the historical reality of the war, the jaw-dropping horror of it all, fades into a vaguely threatening backdrop against which the personal dramas play out. The novels stick to platitudinous images, images reused book after book because they make for good scene-setting without making the reader too uncomfortable: the clocks turned forward an hour to be on German time; the Rue de Rivoli shuttered and silent after dark; someone playing Schumann on the piano while listeners wonder how a people that gave us such beautiful music could be so evil.
When you put one of the Paris War Novels down, you do not carry its weight with you, because little weight was actually put on your shoulders. Yes, people ate pigeon from the streets, but this was considered a feast. If you’d read that scene where the neighbors gathered on Sunday to share their bits and scraps of food, and everyone rejoiced over that one, measly pigeon that was brought to the table, you’d know it was a warm scene, full of small acts of generosity and a feeling of hope as people came together to alleviate their suffering. You’d walk away from it feeling a bit better about humanity. And maybe wanting to try pigeon.
Are the authors to blame, or the readers?
To get a better idea of what the readers of these novels desired, I scanned the reviews on Goodreads. To begin with, I was disheartened to see that the Paris novels outscore the likes of Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, and Salman Rushdie. American Pastoral’s 3.95 fell short of The Paris Seamstress’ 4.10. White Teeth comes in at 3.79 while The Paris Daughter scored a 4.23. And Midnight’s Children, while it has a respectable rating of 3.98, pales in comparison to Rhys Bowen’s The Paris Assignment, which has a whopping 4.32. So what was it that made readers so happy with these Paris books?
“I fell in love with this story,” wrote one reviewer of Harmel’s The Paris Daughter. “The writing was beautiful, the characters were so loveable — even at their worst.”
“I loved this book,” wrote another of Jenoff’s The Lost Girls of Paris (3.92). “Usually books of World War II are so graphic and dark and it was nice to have a change, since this one wasn’t that way at all.”
Another reviewer of Last Twilight in Paris (3.97) said, “I loved this new perspective on WWII that I was not aware of. There were many heroes during the war. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things that made a difference . . . . Last Twilight in Paris is told in a more uplifting way than most.”
While “uplifting” isn’t a word I’d usually associate with World War II, I have to recognize that these books are being read with the expectation that they’ll provide entertainment. And in our ever-more-virtual reality where social media platforms encourage us to inform ourselves in quick spurts — watching a shocking video, reading a horrible headline, or listening to a true crime podcast before swiping with a sigh of relief to something funny or cute — perhaps these books are the literary embodiment of this tendency. Maybe Paris is the metaphorical swipe.
Still, despite these novels’ feather-light touch in addressing the more gruesome aspects of WWII, some Paris War Novels manage to make us pause and think about more serious questions and their implications beyond the melodrama on the page.
In Paris Never Leaves You, Ellen Feldman asks just how long you can get away with looking the other way before you’re suddenly living a horrific reality that you did nothing to prevent:
Half the people who’d been affected had been in the dark, or denial, at least at first. Surely the decree doesn’t apply to French Jews, they insist, only foreigners. Surely it doesn’t mean me, a decorated veteran of the last war, the head of an important corporation, the hostess of a salon that half the German generals would give their eyeteeth to be invited to, a nonbeliever.
The moments where these questions hit hardest are when moral quandaries — existential, philosophical, ethical — are brought down to the human scale of the protagonists. In Ruth Druart’s While Paris Slept, a Jewish woman named Sarah hands her newborn son off to a young man named Jean-Luc before she is forced onto a train bound for Auschwitz. Years later, Sarah returns from the camps and attempts to find her child, who now goes by the name Sam and is being raised by Jean-Luc and his wife — Charlotte, natch — in America. The police get involved and repatriate Sam to his rightful home and country, but the young boy has no desire to be torn from the family he’s always known.
Back in Paris, and forced to live with his estranged biological parents, Sam grows severely depressed. Sarah is torn between returning him to his adoptive parents, or hoping that he’ll come around to the notion that she is his ‘real’ family. I sped through the second half of the novel, desperate to find out what Sarah would decide to do, worried about Sam, and wanting to see if he turned out alright. My feelings pinballed from one chapter to the next, unable to decide which decision was the right one. What is a parent? What happens to a family when it gets torn apart by deportation policies? Can you erase the scars of the past? I do not exaggerate when I tell you I read the last pages of Druart’s novel standing in a jam-packed metro car with my mouth hanging open, hoping I’d get to the end before I had to descend at Charonne.
And while Rayner doesn’t quite push The Paris Dancer to as satisfying a conclusion, she nevertheless attempts to address the question of how much responsibility we have for the actions of other people, especially when they were actions we could have prevented. What responsibility do we have to prevent harm from coming to someone else? If we stand by, can we forgive ourselves? Should we?
After yet another grueling day spent reading the Paris War Novels from the comfort of Paris’ trendiest cafés, I did what any girl would do: I threw open the living room windows of my cozy apartment in the 11th arrondissement and lay on my yellow velour couch, my feet propped up on the arm rest. Then, I took my phone out and started scrolling through Instagram.
At first, it was the usual: golden retrievers, Taylor Swift, baking recipes (damn, am I . . . basic?). Then I came upon a video taken on a residential street in Worcester, Massachusetts, a town just over an hour away from my parents’ home in Western Mass. By the time the recording started, chaos had already broken out, but officers were placing someone in the back of a car and trying to drive away while a group of people swarmed the street, forming a human ring around the car. A young girl holding a baby had placed herself in front of the car to prevent it from driving off. When officers scrambled to try to break up the crowd, the young girl handed the baby to another woman and tried kicking the car’s tires. An officer shoved her back, roughly, and when she tried to get past him again — back to the car that was slowly pulling away — four more officers brought her to the ground by force, slamming her head against the pavement while the car drove off. The woman now clutching the baby tried to intervene, but she was held off by the police. A third woman threw water on the officers, and she too was pushed away.
But what really stopped me in my tracks — what prevented me from swiping on to more golden retriever bliss — was the young woman’s wailing. It wasn’t just any scream, but a primal cry of anguish and terror, anger and hopelessness. I’d never heard anything like it. I don’t really know how to describe it, but suddenly, Rayner’s opening line — “A human cry, protestations of innocence, a shriek of fear. Sounds that left me wide awake, my heart thrumming in the darkness” — didn’t sound so cheesy. I was literally arrested by my animal reaction to the girl’s cry; I just knew the person inside that car was this young woman’s whole world. I watched the video three, four, five times in a row, as though in rewatching, I might find some way to help.
The woman arrested in the video was 40-year-old Rosane Ferreira De Oliveira, an undocumented immigrant from Brazil who came to the US with her family in 2022. The young girl shrieking was her 16-year-old daughter, and the woman with the newborn was her sister, 21-year-old Augusta Clara. Both of De Oliveira’s daughters are in the US under a deferred action program.
On the morning of Thursday, May 8th, Worcester Police responded to several emergency calls, some from neighbors seeking help for an unlawful arrest, others from federal agents calling for reinforcement after a large group of people had surrounded the officers. When the police arrived on the scene, the 16-year-old was in front of the car, holding her newborn nephew. After the officers told her to remove the infant from the scene, she handed it off to her sister; when she tried kicking at the passenger side of the car, the WPD swarmed her and brought her forcibly to the ground.
Dozens of community members came onto the street to try to prevent the detention of their neighbor. Some put their hands on the police officers to prevent them from getting involved, while others shouted, “You’re not supposed to work with ICE!” (According to state law, Massachusetts local police are not allowed to assist ICE in the detainment of civilians.)
Following the incident, the 16-year-old was taken into custody and charged with Reckless Endangerment of a Child, Disturbing the Peace, Disorderly Conduct, and Resisting Arrest. The woman who threw water at an officer, who was identified as 38-year-old Ashley Spring, was arrested and charged with Assault and Battery on a Police Officer, Assault and Battery with a Dangerous Weapon (“unknown liquid”), Disorderly Conduct, and Interfering with a Police Officer.
Outrage followed, with protests organized by community members in Worcester and the Deputy Director of Police Accountability opening an investigation into the event. ICE refused to comment on the matter, but the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement claiming that Ferreira De Oliveira was a “violent criminal illegal alien.”
Just as chilling as the aftermath of the video, however, is what happened before the cameras began recording. According to a report published by Rolling Stone, Rosane’s arrest was an elaborate set-up: a day earlier, the father of Augusta Clara’s son was arrested on his way to work, stopped for having honked at an ICE vehicle that cut him off on the street. The next morning, Augusta Clara was asked to come sign documents at an immigration center, and it was when she was on her way there, accompanied by her 16-year-old sister and newborn son, that ICE agents stopped them. The agents claimed to have an arrest warrant for Clara, though they never produced one. Clara nevertheless acquiesced, at which point the agents said they couldn’t legally leave the infant in the charge of the sixteen-year-old minor.
The sisters did what my sister and I would have done in their place: they called their mother. It was only once Rosane Fereirra De Oliveira left her house (where she could not be arrested) to help her daughters and recuperate the baby, that the ICE agents arrested her instead. That was when the protests began, and the 16-year-old tried stopping the officers, and the neighbors began recording.
As of this writing, ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System (ODLS) shows that Ferreira De Oliveira is still in custody at Strafford County Correctional in Dover, New Hampshire, nearly four months after the incident. She is one of more than 57,000 migrants who are currently being held in detention across the United States. Like Rosane, 71% of these detainees have no criminal convictions.
The video lingered with me. I thought about how this had happened only a stone’s throw from where I grew up, on a street that looked like it could have been in my neighborhood. I thought about how this kind of arrest was happening by the thousands, every day and across the country, a part of President Trump’s campaign promise to implement the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history. Only a month before this video was taken, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller had increased the quota for ICE’s daily arrests, from 650 to 3,000 a day. I thought of all the families that had been torn apart already, and the thousands more that would be soon, if Trump’s orders were to be obeyed. I thought of the children and teenagers who live every day in fear of losing their parents, and those, like Rosane’s 16-year-old daughter, for whom this nightmare has now become reality.
I thought of all this and I felt small, ashamed, angry, and . . . empowered? That was new. But yes, indeed — I wanted to speak out, to share what I’d seen with my friends and family so that maybe, down the road, we could be the ones to step out our door and help a neighbor in a moment of need. I might not be on the streets of Massachusetts myself, but I felt I needed to at least try to let people know there were ways they could prevent inhumanity from spreading. They didn’t have to do anything crazy, or dangerous, either. They could form a human chain, like the neighbors in the video. They could remind the police they’re not allowed to help ICE agents in their arrests. They could do something. Anything.
I spoke with my family that night. I told them about the video I’d seen, about the community members who came out en masse to try and stand in the way of wrongdoing. I told them they should consider doing the same if a similar situation presented itself on our streets. Their reaction was not what I had hoped. I’m not sure creating a human chain actually achieves anything, my father, a retired classics professor, said. They still ended up putting the woman in detention, didn’t they? my sister asked. Only my mother, herself an immigrant to this country, shared my anger. I was heartbroken. Outraged. How could my own family not see how little actions could make for big changes? That’s when I surprised myself with the following thought: Maybe they needed to read a Paris War Novel.
What was it that the reviewer of Last Twilight in Paris said? “There were many heroes during the war. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things that made a difference.” At the time, I’d rolled my eyes. But now, I had newfound appreciation for the fact that the Paris War Novels do not ask that we be great heroes or unforgettable protagonists in order to have a big impact. No need to be a Rose Valland or a Dorothy Reeder. There may even be something to be said for the fact that, because the Paris War Novels are so accessible and the characters so generic, they might inspire action more readily. Estella, in The Paris Seamstress, spends her nights distributing bowls of soup to refugees passing through Paris. Simone in Paris Never Leaves You keeps turning the clocks of the bookshop back an hour, a quiet signal of resistance after the German decree that Occupied France must run on German time. And while Esther may not have been a great figure of the Resistance, when she and her sisters have to leave the Tabarin in a hurry after being outed to the Nazis, their friends in the dancehall clear away the last of their belongings to ensure no trace will be found. If someone as simple as Estella or Simone can stand up for the greater good and do something to help others, then by God, why can’t little old me?
Therein may be the secret key of these novels. Sure, they’re a dime a dozen. Most will entertain you for 200 or 300 pages, and some might even push you to consider deeper questions than you expected. But above all, these novels give us a model of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, like standing up against hate and speaking out against wrongdoing. I used to think that was cheap entertainment. I used to think ‘real’ change was enacted only by ‘serious’ books of the highbrow variety. After writing this piece, I’ve changed my mind.
My ambition as a writer is a simple one: I want to write stories that help make the world a slightly better place. I’m sure every writer says that. And luckily, there are myriad ways a book — be it good or bad, commercial or literary, bestseller or bottom shelf — can achieve this. Some books offer a lonely reader a friend by way of a new character. Others provide a rollicking good time to someone desperately in need of an escape from hard circumstances. And yet others — the Paris War Novels, for example — show readers that they, in small, humble, ordinary ways, can make a difference in the world.
At a time when divisiveness is at an all-time high, when judgment and categorization have impeded our ability to hear each other and care for each other, why should I object to any story that achieves this, no matter the package the lesson comes in? To quote a recent reader of The Paris Library, “Never was the power of books and reading so desperately needed, in the bleakest, dangerous, hardest and darkest of times,” a sentiment mirrored in the motto of the American Library, Atrum post bellum, ex libris lux. And while I don’t know what the future holds, I do believe that so long as the Paris War Novels keep being published in droves, there is reason for hope; for if each one manages to make even a handful of readers more conscientious and caring citizens, then maybe, just maybe, the world really could become a better place. And who knows, if one day I get considered with the likes of Rayner, Charles, Druart, and the rest, I like to think I’d be smart enough to be proud. But some things only reveal themselves with time. At least while we wait, we’ll always have the Paris War Novel.