Introduction

An evocative, coming-of-age story about a Yale graduate’s year in Paris as an assistant to a legendary American photographer: “An appealing debut novel” (Oprah.com, Editor’s Pick).

It’s 1989, the Berlin Wall is coming down, and Kate has just graduated from Yale, eager to pursue her dreams as a fledgling painter. When she is offered a job as the assistant to Lydia Schell, a famous American photographer in Paris, she immediately accepts. It’s a chance not only to be at the center of the art world, but to return to France for the first time since, as a lonely nine-year-old girl, she was sent to the outskirts of Paris to live with cousins while her father was dying.

Kate may speak fluent French, but she arrives at the Schell household in the fashionable Sixth Arrondissement both overwhelmed and naïve. She finds herself surrounded by a seductive cast of characters: the members of the bright, pretentious family with whom she boards, their assortment of famous friends, Kate’s own flamboyant cousin, a fellow Yalie who seems to have it all figured out, and a bande of independently wealthy young men with royal lineage. As Kate rediscovers Paris and her roots there, she begins to question the kindness of the glamorous people to whom she is so drawn as well as her own motives in wanting their affection.

In compelling and sympathetic prose, Hilary Reyl perfectly captures this portrait of a precocious, ambitious young woman struggling to define herself in a vibrant world that spirals out of her control. Lessons in French is “rich and magnetic, a snapshot of one young woman’s life in a city at once ancient and bubbling over with life” (Booklist).

Editorial Review

Excerpt

Chapter One

They say I have no accent and that this is a gift. Sometimes, people can detect a lilt in my voice, which makes them wonder which rural part of France I come from, or maybe which Scandinavian country. But no one can hear that I'm American. And yet, because I am not French, I show almost no signs of belonging to any group or class. In Paris, I am virtually transparent. A gift, perhaps. Un don, so to speak, voilà. But, when you feel invisible, there is no end to the trouble you can get into.

My trouble began in 1989, on a wet September morning at Charles de Gaulle airport, when I decided to splurge on a taxi into town. The worn smells of leather and tobacco were deeply reassuring, the precise blend of odors I craved at the edge of the unknown.

But I probably shouldn't have taken that taxi. Mom claimed that you had a much higher chance of dying on the way to or from the airport than you did on the plane. However, you had much more say about how you traveled on the ground. You could go by car, bus or subway. You could slow down, look both ways, watch your back. On the ground, you could take responsibility. In the air, worry was nothing but a production.

I had just graduated from college, and was trying to ignore most of what Mom said, but I was secretly proud of her, pretending to be as callous as she would have been to any signs of fear in myself as my plane flew to Paris.

The driver asked me where I was returning from. Where had I been on my vacances?

I told him I hadn't been on vacation anywhere. I had been a waitress in New Haven all summer. That was a town on the East Coast, near New York.

Ah, New York!

But I was returning to Paris for the first time in ten years. I wasn't French. My grandfather was though, and I lived here once, for two years, with cousins, in the Nineteenth Arrondissement.

He laughed. Today, he wasn't driving me to the Nineteenth but to the Sixth. Much more chic of a quartier. More central. Mademoiselle was moving up in the world!

We glided through the industrial ring around the city. We had just permeated its first layer when the taxi was rear-ended at a stoplight. There was a shock, a screech, swearing.

I felt so vindicated for Mom that I was strangely overjoyed by this accident, proof positive of her theories of relative danger. I sidelined the fact that she would have told me to take the metro because it was cheaper, and safer. I had wanted a driver to be my own personal shepherd into my new life, even if I had to pay him.

This was my moment in the sun. So what if it was raining? Experience was going to transform all that.

The driver punched the steering wheel, 'merde!', as I flew into his headrest.

“Ça va?” he asked, rubbing his own forehead. “Are you hurt?”

No, no, I was not hurt, and I would wait uncomplainingly on the sidewalk of this outer arrondissement for him to exchange the necessary information with the woman who had hit us.

We were by a news kiosk. I had forgotten that the news kiosks here were green and suppository shaped, that the newsprint was denser than ours, that there were Chupa-Chup lollipops and Hollywood gum for sale, a magazine called Figaro Madame, headlines about a pop star named Johnny Halliday, erotic ads for coffee and chocolate, small posters for chamber music concerts in the Ste. Chapelle, dog shit. It was all coming back.

Looking hard at the familiar candies and magazine covers, I saw their colors and meanings bleed into the lines and shapes at the beginning of a drawing. I pulled a sketch book and pencil from my bag. I kept watching the kiosk, filling with the excitement of impending work, half an ear to the words between my driver and the offending woman. He wrote down her information. She lit a cigarette.

Because I sensed the conversation wrapping up, I did not put pencil to paper. There was too much to draw in the few moments I might have, and I hated resorting to quick symbols and tricks. I was uncannily good at reproducing what I saw, but only in the fulness of time. If I couldn't do it right, I would rather simply stare. I slipped my sketchbook away.

The rain was lightening into the gray gauze I recalled well but hadn’t thought of in years.

In Germany, the Berlin Wall was about to come down. A photo on the front page of Le Monde showed a rock band playing a concert in front of big bright graffiti on the West Berlin Side. I looked into the crowd that filled out the Le Monde photo. People were dancing ecstatically, sensing the coming demolition, except for the photographers who were still, their flashes going off.

Hopelessly, I scanned the photo for my new boss, Lydia Schell, the woman I had come here to work for. She was a photographer, a famous one. Mom had not heard of her, but once I was able to prove her credentials, Mom was impressed that I would have the opportunity to be the Paris impresario to someone with such a name. 'Impresario' was Mom’s term. When I had interviewed with her in her Manhattan town house a few weeks ago, Lydia had called me her assistant.

Now she was in Germany capturing the momentous happenings. There was a chance, wasn’t there, that she was in that crowd, peeking through her lens at me in welcome?

“You made it,” she would say, if only I could spot her. “Bienvenue!” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. At the beginning of the Lessons In French, Kate explains her immature perception of art: “I was too literal. I loved the Monets, but I didn’t actually trust them” (p. 15). In what ways do you think her literal approach to her own art evolves as her year in Paris progresses? Does she finally develop a style? Can you recall a similar evolution in your own life?

2. Did the city of Paris come alive for you in the novel? If you have been there, did it evoke memories? If not, could you picture it? Was the sense of place an important aspect for you in your reading?

3. Because Lessons in French is set in 1989-90, before the advent of cell phones and social media, Kate is truly immersed in her experience of Paris and the Schell household. Although she can write and receive letters and make the occasional expensive phone call, she has none of the instant connectedness that travelers have today. How do you think this affects her experience? How has technology affected your own experience of travel or living abroad?

4. How do you think the Berlin Wall works as a metaphor in the novel? How does this resonate with your own associations from the time of its fall?

5. The working relationship between Lydia and Kate is a maze of blurred lines. Did you find it dysfunctional? How would you describe Lydia’s personality with respect to Kate? Do you think Kate betrayed Lydia? Have you ever had experience with a similarly fraught employer-employee dynamic?

6. How strongly do you feel the theme of class in the novel? How do you think Kate’s ability to fit into various social strata, while always remaining slightly on the outside, serves her? Does it make her more observant or more confused?

7. What is your perception of Lydia and Clarence’s marriage? Do you know couples who seem to thrive on destructive banter? Do you believe at the end that Lydia and Clarence are ultimately solid despite it all? Or have they undermined one another beyond repair?

8. Would you agree that Lessons in French is very much about family? Does it frustrate you that Kate wants so badly to fit into the Schell family, or do you empathize with her emotionally despite her questionable choices? Why do you think she is so ambivalent about reconnecting with her “true” French family?

9. Kate has a lot of trouble establishing her own point of view among the powerfully influential personalities surrounding her in Paris. At one point she says she feels like she is living inside Picasso painting, assuming multiple perspectives, and lying to everyone. There are several characters who call her on this in various ways: Claudia, Christie, Etienne, and Kate’s own mother, who says, “You and I can handle certain pressures. We don’t feel the need to exaggerate or indulge in, quote unquote, stress. We’re survivors. We have perspective. Remember that” (p. 193). Do you think these motherly words are fair at this point?

10. Etienne’s AIDS diagnosis shocks Kate and Christie. Did you anticipate his illness? Does the unnerving sense of invisible crisis permeate the novel for you? Is it a feeling you associate with that particular moment in time?

11. Kate describes Salman Rushdie as striving to “change his condition” while still inhabiting it (p. 235). Do you think the characters in the novel “inhabit” their conditions even as they try to change? Do you feel this is a statement that can be made, in some way, about most people?

12. Discussing her drawing techniques with Etienne, Kate says, “I don’t change things. I see them. I have a talent for seeing” (p. 163). Would you agree with her assessment, and do you think it is true of her personal interactions? Is her way of seeing also a form of blindness?

13. Kate’s final observation of herself, after she has broken up with Olivier and left the Schell family having returned to her own, is that she is “no longer accent-free to the point of invisibility” (p. 337). How do you feel her accent developed throughout the story? Was the progression narratively satisfying? Realistic? Was her accent - or lack thereof - symbolic to you?

14. Has there been a time in your own life analogous to the year Kate spends in Lessons in French, when you found yourself in a foreign set of circumstances and had to adapt? Were you influenced artistically or intellectually? Did you come across whole new facets of human nature? How does Kate’s journey resonate with you?

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