FRENCH SPIRITS

The story of yet another French country house and its travails in the hands of its new, non-French owners, this time told in a relaxed, un-selfconscious, and observant fashion by poet Greene (American Spirituals, not reviewed).

In the small Burgundian village of Rogny in France’s Puisaye, still a raw and wild landscape, Greene and his wife purchase the remains of a presbytery and set about putting it back in shape. This is to be a weekend place—they live in Paris and have day jobs, Greene’s taking him back to the US every autumn—so they can’t get too precious about the details of getting the house up to speed, nor so enrapt as to become tedious. They display just enough exasperation to show that they’re thoroughly familiar with the distinctively French sense of time. Greene gets to know his neighbors as humans rather than sideshow curiosities, charismatics and nuisances together: “farmers, woodsmen, artisans, widows, thieves, and drunks,” the last category including the alcoholic Coco, “the tutelary spirit of the presbytery.” Running through the story are the happenings—enough of them disagreeable to create a convincing sense of reality—that make up a life: big occasions, like Greene’s and Mary’s wedding or his mother’s arrival to live with them; smaller ones, like their maneuverings with a neighboring marquis to acquire a prayer path of ancient hornbeams bordering their property, or the purchase of furniture of suspicious provenance. Greene is also attentive to the land, discerning its seasonal moods, mooching along its river, informing himself about its wildlife, even adopting and nursing a robin-like bird he names Charles, which promisingly returns to the wild.

There’s always something afoot in these pages, but the atmosphere bespeaks sweet torpor as Greene pursues an infusion of pleasure, a modest slice of history, an honest sense of place.