Monsieur Mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French
256
Monsieur Mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French
256eBook
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Overview
Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer.
John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris--not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad.
Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France--to its absurdities, its history, its ideals--but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780735224841 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/07/2019 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 472,568 |
| File size: | 987 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Like many Parisian families, we occasionally rent our apartment out on Airbnb. It’s not an easy process, but it is practical, and as long as you can power through the tedious chore of prepping your house and fielding calls from guests who forgot the code to your building, it does provide some disposable income that’s handy for all those school year vacations that pop up in France like measles every six weeks.
What many Parisian families DO NOT do is rent out their apartment while they’re not on vacation and when their kids are still in school, which is exactly what we did one year by accident, forgetting that the Easter break for families in the south of France hits a week earlier than that in Paris. We realized this fun fact days before our guests arrived, which sent us scrambling to find alternative lodging (on Airbnb of course) in Montmartre, a hop skip and another hop away from our own place in the Tenth Arrondissement.
Sure, it felt odd to pack up our clothes, the printer, plus the dog and cat, hair dryers and book bags, just to hoof it three metro stops west for a week. And yes, it was a bit bizarre to pass your own apartment in the morning on your way to school (now a twenty‑minute schlep) and see the window of your bathroom fogged up from a stranger probably fucking in your shower.
But in the end, the week turned out not half bad. It forced my family to break up a rut we didn’t know we were in, and gave us the chance to see a part of Paris we hadn’t had time to visit much. And it was during this impromptu staycation in Montmartre, dining out early with the kids at restaurants or ducking into a café for a beer midday or riding the bus (the bus?) and taking photos from the window of that bus, that I felt, for the first time in fifteen years, like an American in Paris. A tad curious, kind of stupid, and with much too much energy, not unlike the other Americans I saw in Montmartre that week, marching up single file to the Sacré Coeur church, where they’d take in a breathtaking view of Paris while also being pickpocketed.
Some were backpackers on Snapchat, others were orthopedic‑shoed retirees carrying on about Sedona. And although each looked winded and footsore, each had an enthusiasm for Paris I hadn’t felt in a long time. How could they not? Although it was now a bit Disney‑fied, Montmatre had been the foothold for artists like Picasso and Modigliani and American expat writers like Langston Hughes, and its allure and romance were still potent. The streets were cobblestone and smoothed by time. Chickens turned on those sidewalk rotisseries. People leaned on flipped‑over wine casks smacking back oysters and Muscadet.
I myself probably rounded out the cliché, a real‑life Parisian writer in his peacoat and five‑day‑old scruff scribbling in his Moleskine what the world would never understand but which had to be written. Little did these tourists know, I was just as lost as them, and had they’d asked me in their X‑KUSAY MOI MESSSUR French where the Moulin Rouge was, or in which restaurant Picasso traded his paintings for meals, I couldn’t have helped. Because as a Parisian, I wouldn’t be caught dead at any of them. Yet at the same time it burned me how I’d lost the innocence for this place. I’d strayed so far off the range and gone so deep into the recesses of French life that Montmartre now seemed Vegas to me.
Before I knew it, the week was over and I was back in my own Paris, a grafittied, kebab‑standed, trash‑strewn enclave near the Gare du Nord, feeling as if I’d just had an affair with another neighborhood. And like any cheater, I immediately tried to mask my guilt by finding fault with my present home. “Didn’t it feel nice to just sit outside and hear that accordion play?” I’d mention to my wife, Anaïs. I’d go on and on, harping about the cakes in the windows and the antique dealers, telling Anaïs what a relief it was to not hear sirens or to not have my conscience weighed down as I consider the circumstances of the refugees we pass every day on the way to the subway. (Yes, we’ve had refugee camps in the Tenth—probably because we didn’t try to evict them as other arrondissements have done.) But in my comparisons, I missed that our own Bohemian digs aren’t all that much different from what Montmartre had been back in the day. Anaïs knows this though, and she’s keen enough to see how attached I actually am to our place. She even coined an expression—she claims she made it up, but it sounds too profound for that to be true—“On critique bien, ce qu’on aime le mieux.” (We critique best what we love the most.)
She’s right. I love my adoptive home; so much so, I feel I’m entitled now to flame it à la Française. Yet what I’m zinging isn’t the French institutions themselves, but the Instagram version we Americans have imposed upon them.
Within every best‑selling book about France, there’s no doubt love, but it’s always been on our terms and one‑way. We have this infatua‑ tion with keeping France a quaint and charming dollhouse. If the vi‑ sion isn’t forged by Impressionist paintings, it’s forged by cantankerous civil servants who strike on a daily basis or farmhouses basking in lavender fields or a workplace where emails after 5:00 p.m. aren’t opened. If it’s not warm baguettes and good wine, it’s angelic kids in Bon Point standing next to chic and severe mothers who don’t get fat. According to these best sellers, France isn’t on the cusp of anything. It’s in the preservation business, keeping civilization alive while the rest of the world goes to Best Buy.
When I moved here fifteen years ago, I, too, was under the spell of a rose‑colored France. I had in my head that I’d be eating six‑course dinners while vacationing three months a year with my French actress wife, all while promenading down the Seine with gloves and walking stick. The reality has proven quite different. But not in a bad way, just in a real‑life, run‑of‑the‑mill, everyday (let’s say mediocre) way that anybody who’s working and raising kids, walking dogs, trying to get the Internet installed, paying a mortgage, and struggling to help with homework he himself doesn’t understand can relate to.
For me, Paris is a mess, a confusing, roiling, weird place. If any‑ thing, it’s America now with its Supreme T‑shirt pop‑up sales and cupcake parlors and hoverboards and Google stores that looks clean and vanilla and safe. Anytime I’m back in New York for work, it’s me who takes on the clueless glaze of those Montmartre backpackers, wondering how the deli I used to buy forty ounces at suddenly became an office building or why everyone feels obliged now to crank the AC in March. I’ll question why Amtrak can’t modernize, or how I missed the whole sippy cup craze, and it’s during these ruminations that I real‑ ize what the person across from me has pegged me for—everyday Eurotrash.
My life in France, I tell my friends, is a lot like going back in time to the United States in the seventies, when the cities were rugged, cap gains were high, public schools were still doable, economic growth was minimal, people drank at lunch, and the national fabric and social net were intact, warts and all. When my American friends visit and I tell them this, I see there’s a slight twinkle of newfound romance for France, based on a new set of criteria. There’s also relief. France, the way I pitch it, isn’t perfect at all. And because of that, it’s accessible and, for the most part, English speaking, just like the rest of the world. Sure the Brie, Bordeaux, and baguette thing still exists, but it doesn’t define our life here. Plus those are things you can easily find in Man‑ hattan or Mumbai or Berkeley as well.
What you can’t find though is a Doctor Benayoun who comes to my house at midnight to give me a flu shot raving about Miami and how we should go in on a condo together; or the professor I see when I walk my dog each night teaching French on his off time from a paper board in the cold rain to Syrian refugees camped in our park. Nor can you find my aristocrat father‑in‑law, who has two children my own children’s ages and who has no qualms about asking me to babysit. Enduring love, I’ve learned, is when you’re smitten by something or someone for one reason, but you end up loyal to them for another.
Since our Montmartre staycation five years ago, we’ve made it a point each year to recreate it. We rent out our place during a work/ school week, throw together the suitcases and dog food and book bags and staplers, and live for a few days somewhere else in Paris. We ’ve done Bastille. We’ve done Le Marais. And this year we’re venturing out to the no man’s land of the Fifteenth. And just as with our time in Montmartre, we’ll admire the scenes or walk the Seine or check out a museum. Hell, we might even buy souvenirs. And in doing so, I’ll once again feel like someone in the audience eating popcorn as he watches the stage production of “Paris!!”
Invariably the clock will strike twelve and we’ll return home, hop‑ ing the lucky family staying in our apartment had as much fun as we did. But judging from our Airbnb reviews, the compliments usually stop at the size of our loft. Most are a litany of masked disappointments. The bathroom towels were worn out, or they didn’t exactly love the street, the neighborhood was a bit too noisy and rough, a bit off the beaten trail. Our home in the Tenth wasn’t the Paris they thought they’d be visiting, at least not the one featured in all those books they’d bought at the airport. And in reading the feedback out loud in English to my cackling family and puzzled dog, I realize now how far from home an American can feel when he says in a perfectly accented French huff . . . “Ooh la la . . . les Américains!
Table of Contents
She Had Me at Bah 1
Two More Weddings and a Pig 20
Bringing Up Bibi 32
Où est John? 56
Letter from the No-Go Zone 79
Huge in France 100
Voulez-Vous Think Tank Avec Moi? 117
Wesh We Can 130
Will You Be My French Friend? 151
Country Living 169
The French Resistant 194
No Place Like Chez Moi 215
Epilogue 235
Thanks 243