Too Smart For Their Own Good

An international bestseller about French intellectuals may hit the wall when it comes to winning over an American readership.

Muriel Barbery’s second novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”, has been a runaway success around the world. It’s been translated into 31 languages. It’s sold more than a million copies. It’s received gads of rave reviews and won prestigious awards like the Prix des Libraires. Yet some critics have wondered if it might finally meet its Waterloo on American shores.

The reasoning behind this theory reflects the controversial sentiments raised by Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, who recently argued that America was too insular to consider itself a serious part of the literary world. See, Barbery is not merely concerned with the problems of France. Her book references the cultures of dozens of nations, and its philosophy is meant to be universal. And as if that weren’t enough to turn the collective stomach of a potential American readership, Hedgehog’s protagonists are also unapologetic intellectuals. Quelle catastrophe!

Take Renée, one of the novel’s two narrators. She is the concierge at number 7, Rue de Grenelle in Paris, a 54 year old woman who describes herself in the first few pages as “short, ugly, and plump…poor, discreet, and insignificant.” Yet we will soon learn that Renée is a diamond in the rough. Why? Because she lives and breathes for Art: Proust, Flaubert, Bacon (the painter, mind you), Tolstoy, Stendhal, Peter Greenaway, Bonnie Blue, Blade Runner, Black Rain, Handel, Mozart, Ozu…Barbery drops names with all the sublety of a celebutante describing the guest list of Vanity Fair’s Oscar after-party.

Renée’s counterpart is the pre-teen Paloma, who aptly describes herself as “…intelligent. Exceptionally intelligent.” Paloma is the latest in a long line of literary child geniuses, stretching from Salinger’s Glass family to the wandering protagonist of Jonathan Safron Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” All of these children feel superior to the “normals” who surround them, yet also isolated from them. Paloma demonstrates this duality efficiently: she’s decided to kill herself, but not before recording in her journal as many “profound thoughts” as possible. We are given to understand that she wants to end it all because of the overwhelming vulgarity of the people with whom she is forced to interact.

And boy does Barbery know vulgarity. 7 Rue de Grenelle is chock full of every kind of hateful patrician you can imagine. There is Paloma’s sister, a doctoral student in philosophy whose obtuse thesis will eventually become an object of ridicule. There’s her mother, who quotes literature without understanding it. There are gossips and drug-addicts and social climbers and a vast, bloviating sea of philistines. In fact, the only characters for whom we are allowed to feel sympathy are Paloma, Renée, Reneé’s Portuguese housekeeper friend, Manuela, and a tranquil Japanese man named Kakuro Ozu.

The plot of “Hedgehog” finally kicks into gear about halfway through, when the mysterious Mr. Ozu moves into the building. He installs sliding doors and Bonsai trees, references “Anna Karenina,” and loves cats. He is, in short, the perfect man. By the end of the novel, he has convinced Renée that she is indeed worthy of love, which in turn convinces Paloma not to off herself quite yet. It all fits together as perfectly as a Dutch still-life.

Yet “Hedgehog” didn’t leave me with the warm, fuzzy feeling that many have taken away from the novel. While both narrators raise shameless paeans to the power of language, to the wonders of grammar and vocabulary, they spend the majority of the book clinging to cliché. Consider the evidence:

Renee: “Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”

Paloma: “That’s what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.”

Renee: “What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief, dazzling illusion of the camellia, carving from time an emotinoal aperture that cannot be reduced to animal logic.”

Paloma: “Just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are—vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth—and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.”

In her mistaking of philosophy for insight, as well as the shameless grasp at universality, Barbery reminds me most of novelist Paul Coehlo, who was recently recognized in the “2009 Guiness Book of World Records” as the most translated author in the world. Yet “Hedgehog” is more insidious than any of Coehlo’s bland parables, because it seeks to raise one philosophy above another. In Barbery’s world, you are either an aesthete or a philistine. The Art-less are recast as the heartless.

Sunny Americans will almost certainly respond to the underlying spirit of the novel, its peppy pop psychology, while ignoring the subtle excoriation of anyone so insular as to ignore Japanese Manga or the oeuvre of Pieter Claesz. Thus I offer one warning to my fellow citizens: while you may end up loving “Hedgehog,” you must accept that it will never love you back.