OPINION:
THE FRENCH GIRL
Berkley, $26, 304 pages
By Claire Hopley
The eponymous French girl of Lexie Elliott’s novel is called Severine. “Slim and lithe in a tiny black bikini, her walnut brown skin impossibly smooth,” she shows up at the French vacation house where Kate Channing and five friends, all newly graduated from Oxford, are staying.
“The most striking thing about her is she knew I didn’t like her and didn’t care,” says narrator Kate. “That type of self-possession at the tender age of nineteen — well it’s unnatural. Or French. She was very, very French.”
She’s also dead. After turning up every day to swim and hang out, she vanished on the Saturday the vacationers returned to England. The police questioned them, but Severine was so aloof that none of them could offer any idea about where she might be. Now a decade later, the French police return with the news that her murdered body has been found in a well on the property.
An obvious hiding place for a murder victim perhaps, but Severine was still alive after workmen had apparently sealed it, so it was never examined. Reopened for maintenance, it has now revealed Severine’s skeleton.
One of the English friends must have killed her and shoved her body down the well. Now they are all thriving professionals in London. Naturally they are alarmed. Kate is a legal headhunter. Even a wisp of suspicion could deter the big legal firms she needs to attract as clients. Her fears for her business and herself escalate when she realizes that she’s the major suspect. She has a big incentive to find out who really killed Severine.
Kate is an attractive narrator because she combines the intelligence that underpins her law career and the savvy of the 21st century Londoner. But her life is not all blessed. She has been mostly unattached since her romance with Seb broke up at the end of the French vacation — a blow from she has never recovered.
While the plot of this novel moves slowly, Lexie Elliott’s development of Kate into a rounded character engages attention, especially by her changing perceptions of herself and her friends. When her mind skitters back to that week in France, “and the spider’s web that entangles and binds us all” she says, “I can only think my judgment was disastrously clouded back then.
Possibly — probably even — it still is. She’s interesting because she’s dynamic, responding to her situation, adapting and, not incidentally, developing as a narrator as she begins to doubt herself, letting readers see her mistakes before she is aware of them herself.
The story then is not just a question of whodunit and whether Kate will be arrested, but of how she learns more about herself — and also about the other characters. Many of them are deployed to highlight her problems. For example, the French police, though pleasant, are clever and eerily threatening so Kate’s anxieties seem soundly based.
Her best friend, Lara, always sunny, always popping in and out of beds, counterpoints Kate’s seriousness and emotional devastation. Tom, Seb’s cousin who has remained Kate’s steadfast friend, appears on the first pages to announce the reopening of the investigation into Severine’s death, but doesn’t figure greatly until the second half of the novel, when he dramatizes the lack of insight that prevents Kate identifying the murderer and the motive.
In contrast, Severine is a much less successful depiction. As Kate notes, her self-possession is extraordinary; in fact, it’s a little unbelievable. Then, as Kate focuses on her murder, she begins to reappear. As enigmatic as ever, she’s not a friendly ghost but she is an encouraging presence. This supernatural element disperses the tension built by of the author’s skilled evocation of a lived reality.
The spectral appearances feel like something that was important when the tale was conceived but lost relevance as it progressed. Similarly, the emphasis on Severine’s nationality in the title and in initial description of her affect seems more portentous than it turns out to be. Perhaps it was just supposed to add a soupcon of foreign glamor. Theo, too, seems unnecessary. He was one of the six friends who went to France, but he is dead, killed in Afghanistan before the case reopens, so contributes nothing to the story.
“The French Girl” is Lexie Elliott’s debut novel. It lacks the fast pace of most mysteries, and some of its plotting is slack. But as a novel about the reunion of former college friends it is intelligent, and the author’s dynamic sense of character gives it a grip that makes it worth reading.
• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
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