‘Pleasing Hour’ a novel of several levels

THE PLEASING HOUR, by Lily King, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1999, 250 pages, $24.

Everything about Lily King’s book “The Pleasing Hour” is designed to keep the reader slightly off balance, to withhold pat solutions and easy answers. That’s entirely appropriate, given the situation of the main character, Rosie, who’s gone to Paris ‘the day before the ‘rentre’, the day that all French children return to school,” to care for the three children of a doctor, Marc Tivot, and his wife, Nicole. With just a few years of high school French, Rosie is decidedly out of her depth.

“The Pleasing Hour” is Lily King’s first novel and makes good use of the time she spent working in France. Although she presently lives in Cambridge, she’s spent much of her time on North Haven and, most recently, in Blue Hill.

The novel begins not with Rosie’s first day in Paris, but instead in the small Provencal village of Plaire, some months later. Narrated by Rosie in the present tense, the Plaire chapters recur throughout the book, giving the reader a fixed point from which to view the story’s unfolding.

Immediately our interest is piqued, when Rosie says that her being in Plaire should feel like penitence – but doesn’t. And why, we wonder, is Rosie looking for safety and solace?

At one level, the story is a rather simple one: Rosie, whose mother is dead, has been cared for all her life by a sister; but the sister can’t have children, and so Rosie gets pregnant and gives her child to her sister and brother-in-law. Done in by the pain of her sacrifice, she flees to France, refuses to read her sisters’ letters, chooses not to make friends with the other jeune filles, tells no one of her baby, and, in short, lives “within a world of … hesitation and self-protection, of moderation and mitigation, of meting out and holding back.”

But her self-imposed exile and isolation slowly are eroded by Paris itself, by her increasing command of the language, by her affection for Lola, one of her charges, and, finally, by her feelings for their father, Marc. By Easter, when the family goes to Spain on holiday, Rosie has, by virtue of her ability to speak Spanish, assumed a position of respect rather than servitude.

Rosie’s story, however, is but one of many strands that make up the fabric of “The Pleasing Hour.” Each of the children has a story: Guillaume, the son who wants to be a priest; Odile, the daughter who struggles with her sexual coming-of-age; and Lola, who has to decide which secrets to keep and which to divulge. Marc is probably the flattest character – more a way of advancing the plot than anything else.

Perhaps the most interesting and complex character of all is Nicole, Marc’s wife. Beautiful and seemingly unapproachable, she gradually learns, ironically, to trust Rosie, and, to some extent, to confide in her. Throughout the novel, flashbacks reveal not only Nicole’s story, but also the story of her mother, whose relationship with a German officer during the occupation was discovered and punished by her neighbors.

In the novel’s most unpredictable and satisfying development, Nicole and Rosie become ever more closely linked: both motherless, both suffering different kinds of loss, both drawn to the same man, both caring for the same children. “Why couldn’t I enjoy beauty?” Rosie asks herself; “I imagined discussing it with Nicole. We would agree that it was the impermanence, the inability to possess, the reminder of death.” In fact, Marc calls the two of them “les deux femmes morbides” – the two morbid women.

“The Pleasing Hour” reaches its climax at a bullfight, an appropriate setting for the drama of danger, betrayal, guilt. When we return, at the end, to Plaire, where we began, Rosie has found a way to make a rentre into her own life.

King does an excellent job of using the structure of the novel and also its shifting point of view to emphasize the complexity of the characters and their relationships one to the other. Wisely avoiding a linear story line, she moves back and forth between the Plaire present, the recent past, Nicole’s life, and the wartime story of Nicole’s mother. Alternating between the first-person narration of Rosie and the third-person perspectives of the children, the reader gets to know them as Rosie does and to see the conflicting, ambiguous roles that real people find themselves playing. King keeps these shifting points of view separate and distinct – until the bullfight, where they come together climactically.

Awarded the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, King shows more than great promise, she shows a rare sense of control over her subject and characters. “The Pleasing Hour” pleases in just about every way.

Margery Irvine lives and writes in Blue Hill and teaches English at the University of Maine.