The Great and the Good

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Though written in French, Déon's The Great and the Good is mostly set in 1950s America – we meet the protagonist as he sails for the East Coast university he'll attend on a Fulbright scholarship. Though not wealthy, his mother has paid for his first-class passage so that he will make connections with “the great and the good,” and so he meets the people who will haunt him for the rest of his life. A drunken professor, a haughty aspiring actress, and a South American con artist and his beautiful sister become the true instruments of his education in the sorrows and sufferings of the heart.

With glimpses of Cold War government machinations, the Bohemian squalor of Greenwich Village, and the experimental theater scene, Déon gives us a wry and ironic portrait of postwar America from a foreigner's point of view. For me the weakest link was the central love story – the object of our young hero's passion remained curiously null and featureless to me, and his attachment to her felt more like a narrative necessity than an actual relationship.

I did think that The Great and the Good would make a terrific film, along the lines of Brooklyn, and the weakness in characterization could be offset by some well-thought-out visuals. Michel Déon died in December, an icon of the French literary scene with more than 50 books to his credit, only one of which had been translated before Gallic took him up. Now that he's finally being published in English, let's hope we might see some of his works hit the big time.