I read Le Divorce and was pleased, so when I read the back of this book I was intrigued. I usually read books in 3-4 days, but this one took almost two months to read. I wasn't sure where the author was headed. The characters had shady pasts that were touched upon, but you never quite knew what happened until almost the very end. This did not make you curious, as in a mystery, it made you frustrated. Needless to say, I was quite disappointed.

I'm a big fan of Diane Johnson's novels Le Divorce and Le Mariage for her lovely writing, dead-on characterizations and her observant articulation of the cultural differences between Americans and the French. She has the ability to create characters who are superficially a "type" (such as young American girl in Paris, superchic young Parisian woman, masculine American expatriate journalist, etc.) and make them extremely interesting by giving us a view to their inner thoughts. They never ring false. I was excited to read Lying Low for this reason. Lying Low is another example of her gift for characters, especially with the characters Marybeth/Lynn (the fugitive) and Theo. Other characters are Ouida, the Brazilian immigrant, and Anton, Theo's photographer brother. However, this book was also a bit disappointing in terms of plot. Those four aforementioned characters share a Victorian house in Orris, California, a small college town near Sacramento (read: Davis). Not a whole lot happens externally -- everything important seems to occur inside the characters' heads, and the ending is nothing to speak of -- a rather farfetched catastrophe (not coincidentally very similar to Le Divorce and to a lesser extent Le Mariage). Johnson appears to have first published it in the late 1970's. Perhaps she hadn't yet honed her storytelling abilities to the degree shown in her most recent novels. I liked it, but it wasn't wholly satisfying.

A beautifully fractured tale, moored in anguish but told with compelling wit, eroticism, and consumate wonder.

After reading Le Mariage I was quite impressed as I was after reading Le Divorce. But Le Mariage seemed a bit more "meaty" and interesting in its character development. I found the characters intriguing and witty. I especially liked Anne-Sophie and how her mother's riskee writing influenced her development as a woman. Johnson does a tremendous job of getting the reader involved as a detective in the manuscript mystery. I loved the details of the decor and habits of the French. They were quite real and I felt as if I were too living with this odd mix of people. Totally unpredicatable and worth reading if you enjoy Parisian culture and habits. I especially loved the undercurrent theme of the novel of reading between the lines and getting to the "bottom" of the real emotions of the characters. You really see the thought processes behind the characters. Serge especially becomes a character hard to forget! Enjoy and bon sois!

In her follow-up to Le Divorce Diane Johnson gives us another sharply honed comedy of manners set in the drawing rooms and country estates of modern-day Paris that would make Jane Austen and Henry James proud. She's an expert at revealing the cultural barriers that divide France and America though unlike its more solid and satisfying predecessor, Le Mariage suffers somewhat from the weight of an overly contrived plot. The story focuses on a young cross-cultural couple, a Parisian antiquities dealer and her half-American, half-Belgian fiancé, who gets whisked into seemingly disparate scandals involving hunting laws, a stolen manuscript and some millennial conspiracists from Oregon in the hectic weeks leading up to their lavish wedding. A six-degrees-of-separation plot device connects Anne-Sophie d'Argel and Tim Nolinger with a colorful, Altmanesque swath of supporting characters, including a reclusive French-polish film director living in a quaint chateau outside Paris and his Oregonian wife who's accused of defacing a national historical monument in the name of home decoration. Throw in a moody, semi-handicapped American tourist from Oregon accused of murder, a French historical novelist prone to highbrow sexually explicit prose and a randy French landowner aching to explore marital infidelity and you get one of the motliest crew of fictional characters at least since Le Divorce. Too bad their contrived connections often deny credibility. The concise, measured prose on display in Le Mariage is what ultimately saves the day: Johnson writes with a savage wit that recalls the dark Hollywood novels of Bruce Wagner. But instead of alienating us with a slew of self-absorbed characters, Johnson succeeds in making us like these neurotic, soul-searching Parisians and Oregonian transplants despite their apparent flaws. The novel picks up magnificently in its closing chapters, as Johnson's screwball comedy ascends to the level of expert highbrow farce, including an ode to Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game that so cleverly blurs the lines between French and American cultural differences that you forgive Le Mariage its overcrafted clunkiness. Johnson's latest isn't as deliciously satisfying and rewarding as its National Book Award-nominated predecessor, though reading it is almost as pleasurable.

Following "Le Divorce," a National Book Awardfinalist, Diane Johnson's latest novel, "Le Mariage," isanother comedy of manners set in the expatriate American community inParis. Johnson, who divides her time between Paris and San Francisco, casts an insightful eye over the cultural differences, wholesale assumptions and misperceptions of national character embraced by the French and the Americans who live among them.

The story centers around the upcoming nuptials of American freelance journalist Tim Nolinger and his stylish French fiancée, Anne-Sophie. A horse-oriented antiques dealer, Anne-Sophie's bourgeois ambitions puzzle her famous novelist mother, Estelle, who cultivates a bohemian public persona while harboring highly practical concerns over Tim's ability to provide for her daughter...

The novel's framework, with its increasingly zany and convoluted but believable plot lines, offers a solid scaffold for the dynamics of relationship that feed Johnson's witty observations on marriage, infidelity, morality, bureaucracy and cultural chauvinism. Her humor is dry and tart, but, for the most part, sunny. And her characters are delightful. A sophisticated treat.

In this 1993 book published by A.A. Knopf, the author begins by putting down the tourist in order to laud the traveler. In the following 10 chapters set in Australia, India, Tanzania/Kenya, Grindelwald (Switzerland), London, China, Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong and Utah, she nevertheless proves to be the former. Displaying little curiosity about the people and cultures she visits -- she is usually there as part of a medical junket -- she is all for seeing the famous sites and never fails to mention the cheap trinkets she collects as souvenirs, never failing to deried the tasteless and praise the quality, as if any could ever be the latter. She actually dares to write "since we were in India it would be a shame to miss the Taj Mahal". Rather than people and cultures, the book is about the author herself, without ever giving the reader any compelling reason to be interested. Even on this topic she doesn't present much information to the extent of referring to her husband as "J." or "Dr. M", a dodge rendered all the more curious by the fact that his full name, Dr. John Murray, is given on the book jacket. We are still left wondering about the answers to the jacket's questions "why do we travel, how does it change us"? Given all this, I am curious who created the chapter titles because they are uncommonly good. "The Heart of Pakistan" is nicely-turned, while "Wildebeest" is a wonderfully-ambiguous title which can refer both to the migrating creatures as well as a foolish young lady who puts herself in the path of a lion. But this book has no plan or artistic unity. Rather we seem to get a jumble sale, perhaps the odds and ends that the author has not been able to work into other creations. And sometimes the story is not even Johnson's, but someone else's and she is the mere reporter, and sometimes, as in the case of the polygamists, reported a lot more elsewhere. The book jacket proclaims "a new kind of travel book" -- I would suggest that there's a reason a book like this has not been done before, and in this age of far too many narcissistic books, let's also hope not again.