13, RUE THÉRÈSE

Metafiction in which a visiting American professor’s Parisian secretary makes sure that he finds a box of mementos, which lure him into researching the life of the box’s deceased owner.

The eponymous Parisian address happens to be the actual address where first-time novelist Shapiro lived as a child, downstairs from an actual woman named Louise Brunet, and the fictional life presented here is based on the real Brunet’s actual box of mementos, unclaimed after her death. The fictional professor Trevor Stratton begins to study the mementos, which range from photographs to letters to a rosary to bits of dried flowers, scanning them on his computer and writing his conjectures about them to someone he addresses only as “Sir.” The basic story that Trevor puts together is standard romantic melodrama. During World War I, Louise is romantically pursued by her cousin, who dies in battle before they can culminate their love. When Louise’s brother survives the war only to die from the 1918 flu epidemic, her otherwise loving and unremarkable father sexually attacks Louise in a fit of despondency—an act that makes sense only as a literary excuse for Louise to marry Henri Brunet, her father’s associate in his jewelry business. Louise, a part-time music teacher, cares for her gentle, less-than-passionate husband, but despite her best attempts remains childless. In 1928, an attractive couple with three sons, and another child on the way, move into the building, and Louise actively pursues an affair with the husband. Then Louise’s gifted adolescent music student declares her love for Louise. Overwhelmed, Louise goes away alone for a few days before returning home and recommencing her life. As he writes about Louise, Trevor makes it clear that he has fallen in love with Josianne, the woman who engineered his research, a character as unformed as Trevor himself.

A creaky romance that lacks substance. But the book is an interactive-marketing goldmine: Readers can use codes to link up to the book’s website.