The Chateau

William Maxwell

There is little that's more pleasurable for a booklover than starting a book of which you had no special expectations and discovering as you read that it is in fact, going to turn out to be a great book. The Chateau is a marvellous book, but I'd never heard of the author before and it was merely a book a friend passed on to me with a vague murmering of recommendation. I learnt later that William Maxwell is regarded as one of America's overlooked greats. The Chateau was published in 1961 and the author died recently.

It's a great book, not because of plot or purple prose, but because of its description of a relationship. The relationship is France on the one side and America on the other. The Americans in the book are Harold and Barbara Rhodes and the French are the other occupants of the chateau in rural France which Harold and Barbara have selected as a base for a planned Summer of touring and learning French. The year is 1948, France is still exhausted by war. The chateau's owner is a cold and charmless matronly woman of middle-age, clearly from a prominent family from whom all the money has leaked away. The chateau, like France, is in poor repair. Harold and Barbara are upper-middle-class Americans, comfortably well-off, tall and both young. The symbolism only stretches so far; they are also unhappily childless.

Harold and Barbara spend much of the book hurt and anxious. They love France but France doesn't seem love them back. In truth their entire plan of a comfortable summer in France learning French and distributing soap and stockings as "gifts from Uncle Sam" was doomed from the start. Over-eager and much too sensitive the couple are upset at their failure to connect with the French. There are friendships, but only towards the end when Harold and Barbara have learnt to be less ambitious and to be content with small victories.

It sounds like a slight basis for a 400 page novel but Maxwell writes so cleverly that every page is a pleasure. I believe the author truly understands both the American and the European soul. It's also enjoyable as a period piece. Barbara and Harold, that breed of native English speakers who expect to have to speak French to survive in France, are long extinct, sadly.