BECOMING BUDDHA

An American in France begins a difficult friendship with a mysterious expatriate in this novel.

An unnamed narrator moves to Paris from America and gets a job as a translator at a language institute. He doesn’t have the success in picking up women that he did back home, and the celibacy is starting to get to him. That’s why he befriends Alex, the staggeringly handsome and opinionated misanthrope with an ill-defined past. “I can say with pure honesty that I’ve never had a friend like Alex,” he muses after the fact. “I doubt that I ever will again. But will I ever need another one like him? No. I have changed since I met him…for the better? For the worse? All I can say for sure is that I’m not the same person I was when I left home.” After a brief initial conversation, Alex offers to show the narrator “his Paris”: a city that “would either put me on a jet back to the New World or give me the kind of cravings that made cigarettes seem like licorice whips.” So begins a descent into hedonism that the narrator has always secretly desired, but can his new friendship survive the ride he’s about to take? More importantly, will the narrator survive it himself? The book’s framing is urgent and intriguing, reminiscent in some ways of the novels of Chuck Palahniuk. Unfortunately, Croft lacks Palahniuk’s storytelling gifts. The prose is choppy, and its tone varies between smug and unfeeling. Here he describes the end of his most meaningful pre-Paris relationship: “Her militancy for the rights of marginalized insert-vulnerable-demographic-here began to outweigh the counterbalance of her previously laid back, sex-hungry persona.” The book is essentially a series of sexual encounters and philosophical dialogues, all designed to make the narrator seem like a brooding conqueror of women, who are steadfastly portrayed as insecure, phony, or damaged. The narrative is slow and ultimately unsatisfying. Despite the title, there is not much that is enlightening here.

An uneven tale about a sex-obsessed American in Paris.