The Chateau - by William Maxwell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes a sage and luminously observed novel of Americans abroad.

"I can think of few novels . . . that have such romantic authority as The Chateau, fewer still so adult in vitality, so alight with humor." --Elizabeth Bowen

It is 1948 and a battered France is just beginning to receive its first American tourists since the war. Perhaps it is not ready for them. Or perhaps they are not ready for France.

For although Harold and Barbara Rhodes, a young American couple arriving for a holiday, are enchanted by the small perfections that greet them at the Chateau Beaumesnil and tolerant of the lack of such amenitites as sugar and hot water, there is much that bewilders them. Is their hostess, the gallant Mme Vienot, flirting with Harold? Will they ever win the approval of the impeccably connected M. Carriere and his forbidding wife? Can American eagerness and goodwill ever decipher the ancient codes of French civility? In a voice that is by turns rapturous and ironic, and with an eye that looks kindly on both the beautiful and the absurd, William Maxwell creates the most astute and affectionate portraayal of the meeting of two cultures since the masterworks of Henry James.

Review Quotes

"Maxwell's voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest." --John Updike

"Maxwell is a formidable presence in American literature. . . . One of American's most distingiushed and distinctive stylists." --The Washington Post

About the Author

William Maxwell was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois. He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and after earning a master's at Harvard, returned there to teach freshman composition before turning to writing. He published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For 40 years, he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for So Long, See You Tomorrow, the National Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.