Twentieth-century American literature has a tradition of writers exiling themselves to Paris, from Lost Generation icons like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to the later wave of black expatriates like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. To this day, The Paris Review is our preeminent literary journal: it was founded by Americans in Paris in the 1950s and retains the name and the City of Light’s aura of sophistication despite a soon-thereafter return to New York. For Americans, Paris glowed with avant-garde and European ideas, as opposed to dull American reality. Writers fled there to loosen the bonds of convention, live extraordinary lives, and create literary art in an environment of intellectual freedom.
Today, as suggested in the new novel The Comforts of Exile, by Trevor Cribben Merrill, Paris is no less influential for writers, but it demands a movement in reverse: it is an opportunity not to escape from reality, but to return to it.
When a novelist invokes “comforts” in the title of a novel, the savvy reader prepares to encounter discomfort, and so it is with Merrill’s book. The novel, his second, is a classic post-campus bildungsroman following aspiring young literary man Colin Phelps as he packs up the car after college and readies to launch into adult life. In short order, Colin’s girlfriend, Julia, breaks up with him — basically the second he’s schlepped her last box into her mom’s house — and he flees to a job teaching English near Paris, motivated partially by the desire to make Julia jealous and win her back.
Once in Paris, Colin meets Laure, herself reeling from the end of a relationship, and falls in love. But is either really done with their ex? Colin is torn between a life in Paris and precipitous marriage to Laure, or a return to America and Julia. In the process, he’s forced to confront his own pretensions to literary grandeur and inability to commit.
The first discomfort posed by this novel springs from the perceived blandness of its subject matter. Colin’s school is never named, but Yale oozes off the page, and Merrill seems to be asking us to take seriously the banal drama of an elite young man, two girls, and a year abroad, conveyed via the traditional means of plot, character, and scene.
The form and aesthetics of The Comforts of Exile are almost aggressively normie, as well. In the novel’s first line, Colin exits a Jeep Cherokee and steps “onto the sidewalk in my khaki shorts and sneakers.” This is close to bad writing, and the reader wonders what we’re in for as Colin gazes up at Julia’s dorm, situated beneath a “gothic bell tower” and behind an iron gate. No detail seems too small to linger on. Colin swipes through — with a beep and a click — ostentatiously telling us that he’s not noticing the wrought-iron eagles in the scrollwork and the “humorous stone carvings,” — though clearly he is, because he’s telling us about them — and that his inattentiveness is due to an “uneasy sense that my trip might turn out otherwise than planned.”
Colin’s unease is warranted. Julia dumps him, and in Chapter 2, we find him sleeping on a mattress on a floor in Boston, where the barrage of detail continues. “Upon waking, my first thought was that my pillowcase smelled bad and needed to be washed,” Colin observes. “Exhausted from hours of fruitless creative effort,” he has overslept. The realization slowly dawns that the author knows the khakis and the pillowcase are quotidian and he’s being funny. He also knows that the prose could come across like a writer uncertain which details are important to include, and he’s playing with a note of humorous mimesis — Colin, possibly, is a bad writer. But Merrill is a very good one.
The style serves the book’s thematic mission to reground literature in the material and save Colin from his own pomposity. The “exile” of the title is only situationally Paris. Really, it is Colin’s exile from the real. He lives in an airy, over-intellectualized realm of ideas and aspirations that prevent him from achieving an authentic life. He has endless writerly brainwaves: he’s looking for “an all-encompassing insight, the key that would unlock the central theme of my work” and to this end makes absurd, impossible-to-execute notes for “a novel about the metaphysical assumptions of modernity” or “a novel about MORAL PRESSURE” (the capitalization is his). And yet the pages remain blank. He’s also vain, proud, and silly; frets about his clothing, how he smells, and what people think of him; admits to “a horror of rejection and ridicule,” and dreams of how much cooler he’d be if he seemed French. His big fashion risk — a black turtleneck — which he wears sweatily despite warm weather, is another humorous touch.
This alienated and somewhat desperate state isn’t comfortable at all.
Merrill is the author of a previous novel and several monographs, including The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard, and The Situation of the Catholic Novelist. In addition to teaching French at Caltech, he runs the Imitatio program, an institute devoted to the study of Girard, for the Thiel Foundation.
This pedigree suggests that a Girardian analysis of The Comforts of Exile would be fruitful. Also, Girard’s descriptions of political polarization and social breakdown, written in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, have been prescient of trends in the internet age, endowing the French literary critic and philosopher with new influence and authority.
Colin struggles as a writer because of his attraction to big ideas and his inability, as he puts it, to “be specific.” At university, he and Julia both studied creative writing with a famous writer, McClatchy, who provides Colin with entree to the literary scene in Paris, and who will play a role in the denouement. Once in Paris, Colin tries to interest himself in specifics, but begins to think that he has “a mental illness that prevents you from becoming interested in concrete details.” On his search for a cure, he comes across The Forlorn Demon by the poet and literary critic Allen Tate, which argues that contemporary thought is “disdainful of the material world” and that the only authentic experience can come from feeling.
Colin finds the instruction useful in terms of courting Laure, and a version of the idea also appears in Girard’s Deceit, Desire & the Novel, in the guise of “passion.” Girard’s theory is that most human desire, in a secular age, is mimetic — copied from people around us, instead of authentically arising in the self. As a foundation of self, this state is fundamentally unstable, and leads to a “sterile oscillation between pride and shame,” which is very much Colin’s issue. Mimetic desire also leads to a hellish world of polarization, hatred, and envy, as we feel rivalry with the “mediator” from whom our desires are copied. Authentic passion, a possible antidote, is more a quality of the past, when people were “narrowly and superstitiously religious,” and focused their self-modeling on God instead of other people, but it’s one of the few opportunities Girard suggests for an escape from the hell on earth of mimetic desires.
Another possible escape found in Girard is creative and can be found through the process of writing a great and true book, which requires the “death of pride and birth of humility,” as he outlines in Deceit, Desire & the Novel. Colin pursues both passion and writing clumsily, but in a real way. As the story develops, Merrill’s gentle mockery has made him a sympathetic character, and his great crash-and-burn in the final third of the book, which involves taping a radio show on McClatchy’s legacy in an almost disembodied state of pride, stress, ambition, and fear, has genuine power. Many of us have brought similar emotions to life milestones.
By the end, the quiet drama of settling this earnest, vain, well-meaning, somewhat silly young man down with the right woman has performed a neat trick and become larger than itself, and imbued with dignity. Merrill’s thoughtful attention to his own subject elevates it.
His attention to craft offers a hopeful note for the future, as well. Bucking most of the trends in contemporary literary fiction, he’s using the old tools: defining characters, motivations, and stakes; plying the art of plotting; manipulating suspense and reader expectation; and writing quietly perfect prose. A laptop is “hefty” and “gray,” — effortlessly setting the time period. A woman meeting Colin in a café reads a few sentences of his book before handing it back, “her face serene” — evocatively French-phlegmatic. We know what the characters look like, which is oddly rare in novels. And their particularities make us care about them. It’s a reminder of how good novels once were, and perhaps could be again, with some attention to detail.
But more than that, Merrill’s work suggests a new direction for literature. He’s writing about writing, to be sure, which has been the novel’s project since the advent of modernism, but he springs the modernist trap of airless self-reference by grounding his character in place, time, and narrative structure. Appropriately, it’s an innovation forged in Paris.
