This brisk, engaging novel of the aftermath of the first World War finds two young American men, Beau Shipley from Charleston and the half-Quebecois Caleb “Keeby” Styles, facing the question of how to go on with life after injury and existential terror in the trenches. Paris ignites something in both men, as Beau fumbles, at first, to reconcile his new interest in painting with his responsibilities back in the States. Keeby falls in with a Left Bank Bolshevik collective, penning articles for a revolutionary broadsheet—"The poorest and most destitute among Paris’s denizens would become his muses,” notes Helms (author of Holy City, among many others.) As Keeby discovers a wild new life among the minds shaping the century, Caleb, back home, faces his wealthy father’s expectations, the tragedy that has befallen the woman he considers his true love, and an America shaken by the Spanish Flu and Prohibition.At the heart of Helms’s novel are questions of what to make of new possibilities and dreads in a world shattered by war at an industrial scale. Helms relishes the dishy pleasures of Paris salon culture, imagining sharp, inspired colloquies with Stein, Pound, Rimbaud, and more, but rather than simple celebrity cameos these encounters suggest the new ways of living, seeing, and creating now open to Caleb and Keeby. A vital thread about a film adaptation of a book by Keeby reveals the accelerated rate of change in culture, tech, and mores.
The drama is intimately personal as Beau finds himself exemplifying a lost generation. A South Carolina seething with racism no longer feels like home, but rousing moments of discovery as an artist—"the world collapsed into only three entities—the church, the light, and the paint”—and the frisson of new ideas offer liberation. Despite themes of trauma and suicide, the storytelling is fleet and crisp, the prose as pleasurable as the “croissants and Normandy butter and sweet French fruit preserves” that break these characters’ fasts.
Takeaway: Moving novel of the lost generation of soldiers and artists in Paris after WWI.
Comparable Titles: Liza Klaussmann’s Villa Americana, Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
