The Pleasing Hour

The Pleasing Hour is as sensuous and ambling as a river in summer. With great delicacy, it tells how Rosie, a 19-year-old American comes to Paris to be an au pair for Marc and Nicole and their three children and recasts the family and their love. While other au pairs want to acquire fluency and a Parisian accent, Rosie needs to escape from her recent decision to act as a surrogate mother for her infertile sister. She is "guarded, flinchless", her breasts leak and she's "big and unspectacular, nothing like the cinema samples". In the home of the elegant and abrasive Nicole, she feels inconvenient and judged. King excels as she conveys the awkward peculiarity of the au pair job, which places you "en famille", while denying any real and lasting access to its intimacies. Rosie is brilliantly placed to dissect the snobbery and bourgeois concerns that Parisians are so good at and King hits the mark with wit and accuracy as the family reveal their subtle and not so subtle anti- Americanisms. As Rosie becomes a confidante, the characters develop in dimensionality and sympathy. Guillaume, the youngest, nurses unfashionable fervour for the priesthood; Lola needs love and sensitivity and misses nothing; while Odile, the eldest, begins to become aware of her desire for other girls. Despite Marc's bad posture and splayed feet, Rosie finds herself attracted to him and their adultery is handled in fresh, erotic and unexpected ways. As Nicole attains the uncanny perceptiveness of the deceived, Rosie chooses to protect her from the kind of loss she herself has suffered and leaves for Provence, to take care of an elderly woman, who once cared for Nicole. Only through this second sacrifice does Rosie learn what she needs and wants and also learns from the older woman why Nicole is so self- protected.

King weaves a complex and intricate set of relationships with humour and emotional insight. The surprising shifts in alliances and loyalties are convincingly told and avoid the common traps of sentimentality and melodrama. It's both a well-toned and languid novel set against the dreamy backdrop of "the pleasing hour", the lilac light of a French dusk. -- Cherry Smyth


Genre: Literary Fiction