CLEAN START

Neo-boho naïfs in Montparnasse take in a glamorous stranger who turns their lives upside down—in Page’s portrait of 1960s down-and-out Paris.

The end of innocence is signaled by the arrival of a pair of great gams. Tom and Jane are a young married couple—he from England, she from Australia—barely making ends meet (by teaching classes) but leading a happy existence in their fraying-at-the-edges apartment. Jane, who narrates, knows just how close to crushing poverty their existence is but relishes living out her dreams of bohemia (“Montparnasse was still Montparnasse. Giacometti and Sartre were still alive. . . There was still creativity around. . . . I’d arrived just in time. I was in on the finish”). As for Tom, he’s a poet who probably cheats on her and has a fetish for women’s legs. One day when he’s in their favorite bar, a woman with an astonishing pair walks in and catches his eye. Soon he and Jane are sharing the table with Sally—a high-drama type from Australia who has just crash-landed in Paris after another badly considered relationship imploded on her—and it isn’t long before she’s staying in a spare room in their apartment. Sally treats the two to shocking secrets about her life, alternately fascinating and dismaying. Jane finds herself especially conflicted at having this disruptive but somehow unstoppable force suddenly an inextricable part of their lives, quickly making things seem poor and tatty instead of exciting and bohemian. Australian writer Page (Hope’s Cadillac, 1996) knows her characters well, and she renders her setting—the last glow of Paris as an artists’ wonderland—with a few brief but resoundingly bittersweet passages. Somewhat more overdone is Jane and Tom’s relationship with Sally, which takes too long to move to a too-obvious conclusion.

Reality’s unfortunate onset becomes—if imperfectly—a romantic paeon for a lost time and place.