Paris, He Said

by Christine Sneed

Overview

Jayne Marks is questioning the choices she has made in the years since college and is struggling to pay her bills in Manhattan when she is given the opportunity to move to Paris with her wealthy lover and benefactor, Laurent Moller, who owns and operates two art galleries, one in New York, the other in Paris. He offers her the time and financial support she needs to begin her career as a painter and also challenges her to see who and what she will become if she meets her artistic potential.

Laurent, however, seems to have other women in his life and Jayne, too, has an ex-boyfriend, much closer to her own age, whom she still has feelings for. Bringing Paris gloriously to life, Paris, He Said is a novel about desire, beauty, and its appreciation, and of finding yourself presented with the things you believe you've always wanted, only to wonder where true happiness lies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620406939
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	02/02/2016
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Christine Sneed is the author of Little Known Facts. She has a creative writing MFA from Indiana University and teaches creative writing at DePaul University, Northwestern University and Pacific University. Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry won AWP's 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, first-fiction category, was named the Chicago Writer's Association Book of the Year, and the recipient of Ploughshares' 2011 first-book prize, the John C. Zacharis Award. It was also long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and named one of the seven best books of the year by Time Out Chicago. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Notre Dame Review, and a number of other journals. Visit her website at http://www.christinesneed.com.

Editorial Reviews

A wry, sexy, clever little gem of a novel, Christine Sneed's latest lights up the streets of Paris with elegance and wit.” —Jami Attenberg, New York Times bestselling author of THE MIDDLESTEINS

“A novel about art and artifice that is heartfelt, a novel about love and deception that is clear-eyed, witty and wise. Sneed entertains and tantalizes, in the most Parisian manner.” —Amy Bloom, author of LUCKY US

“Art, desire, romance, and Paris itself are brought so beautifully together in Christine Sneed's new novel. She writes with contagious affection for her characters, and in the delightful and delighted hours I spent inside PARIS, HE SAID I had that rare feeling we can get from a novel—I was happy to be alive.” —Scott Spencer, National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of ENDLESS LOVE

“If Henry James were still with us, he'd not only approve of Paris, He Said, he could have written it himself, though without his serpentine syntax. It's a delicious treat, studded with wise and beautifully observed detail, that places side by side those perpetually fascinating antagonists, the eager, casual American and the meticulous, pleasure-driven French. Christine Sneed knows everyone's intimate secrets and her book is lively, amusing, and, ultimately, kind to pretty much all of them.” —Rosellen Brown, New York Times bestselling author of BEFORE AND AFTER

“Paris, He Said is about more than the double-edged sword of open relationships. The books' true heart lies closer to the potentially even more discomfiting subject of ambition, and it is this focus that elevates Paris, He Said—from merely an entertaining novel about a near-universal fantasy to a serious exploration of how one manages the hunger for recognition and success, and why one might harbor ambivalence about that aspect of oneself . . . [It is] an absorbing, original tale about the questions we all end up confronting as we grapple with the interplay between who we are and who we think we want to be.” —New York Times Book Review

“Sneed judiciously dramatizes gender expectations, the 'erotic imagination,' the struggles of women artists, and the divide between outward appearance and inner realities. An alluring, provocative novel about the coalescence of the self and the art of living.” —Booklist

“Sneed is very good at elucidating the doubts that plague many women when it comes to their careers . . . This frothy novel, about sex and secrets in the city of light, contains many observations about womanhood, personhood and the ever elusive but never-too-late-to-learn 'knack for happiness.'” —Oprah.com, Best Books of Spring

“Sneed allows readers to revel in Paris' celebrated light while walking its wide boulevards and cobblestone streets. If you love the City of Light or have always wanted to travel there, Paris, He Said is worth a visit. You'll come for the story but stay for Sneed's painterly homage to the city's art and culture.” —Chicago Tribune

“Sneed expertly keeps the pages turning in this delightful novel. Paris, He Said offers readers, too, an entertaining escape from the mundanities of daily life. With clever and graceful prose, Sneed deftly guides a story that explores whether satisfaction follows when all one's deepest wishes come true.” —BookPage

“[Sneed's] most subtle and accomplished work to date . . . A brave book. Sneed offers, with quiet confidence, her characters' increasing complexities. People, like the best art, deserve more than one interpretation. There is little black and white contrast in Sneed's work, and she lingers in every gradation of shade in between, as if gray were a full palette of color.” —The Millions

“Combining desire, sex, and fine art like only the French can, this petite mort of a novel depicts Paris as a faraway land where beauty, if not love, is eternal.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

“Sneed . . . writes slyly funny, masterful comedies of manners utterly unlike anything else in American letters.” —Joanna Rakoff, The Independent

“Dives into Paris like a tourist in love . . . In the best, most pertinent ways, Paris He Said's Jayne Marks reminds me of Rabbit, Run's Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom; both characters attempt to escape the constraints of their lives, get caught in self-created webs of uncertainty, and must reckon with the conditions of their decisions and limitations for happiness. Because Sneed's heroine is a single, female artist, her struggle brings to light a contemporary conflict particular to women—namely their reliance on youth and beauty, and their reluctance to believe in themselves.” —The Rumpus

From the Publisher

…Paris, He Said is about more than the double-edged sword of open relationships. The book's true heart lies closer to the potentially even more discomfiting subject of ambition, and it is this focus that elevates Paris, He Said—from merely an entertaining novel about a near-universal fantasy to a serious exploration of how one manages the hunger for recognition and success, and why one might harbor ambivalence about that aspect of oneself…Paris, He Said is not a book about being in love, even if at first blush it seems to want to be. It is a book about self-discovery, an absorbing, original tale about the questions we all end up confronting as we grapple with the interplay between who we are and who we think we want to be.

The New York Times Book Review - Robin Black

2015-02-25
A mild meditation on art and relationships by the author of Little Known Facts (2013).A talented painter, Jayne Marks lacks the confidence to pursue her art and has instead been slogging through two unfulfilling jobs in the years since college to pay rent on her crappy Manhattan apartment, prompting the question: why not move to an outer borough like all the other young people and artists? She seems resigned to her fate until she starts a romance with Laurent Moller, an older French man and the successful owner of art galleries in Paris and New York, who, after dating Jayne for five months, invites her to move to Paris to be his live-in girlfriend and benefactee. She accepts. Paris, of course, presents a host of social hurdles in the form of Laurent's lecherous business partner, his judgmental ex-wife, and his chilly grown daughter. Jayne is insecure and wishy-washy about all her relationships and confused about Laurent's insistence that they retain privacy about what they're doing when they're not together. Is that where her own infidelity starts, or is it her natural reluctance to say what she wants, combined with the small flame she keeps burning for an ex? Laurent, in a passage written from his perspective, adds gusto to the proceedings but not much in the way of illumination. Bigger questions about being kept, mixing business and pleasure, and the creative process go mostly unexamined. Oft-mentioned details that should add depth to the characters—that Laurent's family is in the wine business or that Jayne spent time in Washington D.C., before moving to New York—have little apparent importance to their personalities or lives. Sneed should be applauded for not diving headlong into salaciousness, which her subject matter could invite. But her touch is so light that the issues at stake feel inconsequential.

Kirkus Reviews