PALAIS-ROYAL

by Richard Sennett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 1986

An epistolary/diaristic re-creation by sociologist/novelist Sennett (Authority; An Evening of Brahms). It's dedicated, fittingly, to the memory of Michel Foucault--and very Foucaldian is its enormous appetite for intellectual synthesis and pedantic illustration. Ranging across the brisket of the 19th century in Paris and London, the story--or what passes for one--concerns a pair of English brothers, the Courtlands: Fredrick, an architect of daring vision yet true aesthetic tact; and Charles, once a country curate who, humbled by the avidity of faith of someone like John Henry Newman, finds his own vocation wavering and instead follows his brother to France, where he establishes himself as a journalist, a kind of English Goncourt. Added to the recipe are the letters and journal entries of a young woman, Adele Mercure, whose family connections to the Courtlands (her mother is Fredrick's mistress) leave her all the more hungry for their heady intellectual integrities. But it's the social lists and names (Gautier, Liszt, Balzac), and the architectural/cultural implications of the Paris arcades (Fredrick's project, and that which so involved Walter Benjamin)--it's these and asides about theater and Cardinal Newman and scandalous journalism that interest Sennett more than sustained novelizing The letters can confuse--they do not necessarily answer each other sequentially; the time-frame is elastic, to say the least; and Sennett's researches come off feeling more like the steel engravings of an old book than like its text. Impressive. ambitious but flat.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 1986

ISBN: 0393312518

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986

Categories: FICTION