MY YEAR IN PARIS WITH GERTRUDE STEIN

Who was Gertrude Stein and what was her meaning? Those are the questions asked by a 21st-century writer visiting Paris and forging new friendships there.

Levy’s latest is an inventive meld of biography and novel that interleaves a consideration of Stein’s development and uniqueness with an account of three female friends in the French capital in 2024. The unnamed narrator, a published writer, is researching and composing an essay on Stein while spending time with Eva, a graphic novelist whose cat is missing, and finance worker Fanny, who’s blessed with three female lovers. A loose chronology is applied to the Stein material, beginning with her American origins and medical training in the 1890s. Arriving in Paris at 29 in 1903, Stein initially lived with her brother, Leo, with whom she hosted salons and collected “outlaw” art—Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne. Stein met Alice B. Toklas in 1907, became her wife, and together endured Europe’s upheavals, surviving the Nazis—both were Jewish—by moving to the countryside. Stein wrote constantly in many forms, achieving fame at 60 with her bestselling The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but it’s her reputation as a modernist that endures. The narrator’s thoughts on her subject loop through Stein’s iconoclastic role, her starry friends and admirers, and her often gnomic writing, which is quoted frequently. What emerges is a persuasive portrait of Stein—unfettered by corsets, curiously magnetic to men despite her queerness, a self-proclaimed genius who wanted to “excavate the future.” “Stein and Picasso had made a new language,” Levy writes. “The door was no long ajar between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They had broken the chain and opened the door.” One character tells the narrator: “You will write about the avant-garde in the language of realism,” which is partly true in this short, witty, intriguing work.

A beguiling genre-splicer, strewn with questions and some answers.