French Sensation

JUSTINE LEVY'S ROMAN À CLEF

Anaïs Nin once said, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Nothing Serious, the new novel by Justine Levy, daughter of the flamboyant French moralist and political philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, is a thinly veiled roman a clef that has set tongues a-wagging over its scandalous content, even knocking The Da Vinci Code off the top of European best-seller lists. Nothing Serious, out from Melville House this month, features Louise, the jaded daughter of a famous European writer. Louise is in trouble: her mother is fighting cancer, her grandmother has died, and her marriage has fallen into ruin—a break seemingly precipitated by her husband's envy of her father's success, Louise's obsessive love of her father, and her husband's falling in love with his stepmother, supposedly modeled on Mick Jagger's nubile ex-lover Carla Bruni. Despite all this, Louise narrates the book with an appealing and cool C'est la guerre attitude. Whether she is in love or in pain, she speaks, sometimes maddeningly, as though she were squinting through a haze of cigarette smoke, shrugging her shoulders. This slim, sexy little book will make you want to steal away on your lunch break to savor its pleasures. —E.S.

E.S.