Paris to the Moon

    In the 1920’s, George Orwell lived among refugees in Paris, washing dishes in restaurants, and teaching English for a pittance. In the 1950’s, James Baldwin wrote about how living in Paris allowed him to be “just another American.” Orwell shocked readers by exposing the filth of the restaurant kitchens, and Baldwin marveled about how the Gendarmes never bothered him. Now we have Adam Gopnick, an American writer, being bored and peeved in Paris. Like most Americans, he expects Paris to be fun, fun, more fun, and really, really interesting. Sadly, he’s disappointed by the end. He doesn’t experience the vibrant lives of the poor, as Orwell did in Down and Out in Paris and London.  Nor does he find shock and surprise at the lack of anti-Black racism, as Baldwin did in Notes of a Native Son. What Gopnick finds is boredom, boredom, and more boredom. Accustomed to the “customer is always right” idea of doing business, he finds the coldness of the French to be too much.

    The most vivid memory I have of this book is the part here he tries to join a gym. In France, sports and fitness are not as important as they are for Americans, maybe because they walk a lot more. Parisian men and women aren’t into racquetball, biking, tennis, and other athletics. Few adults belong to gyms, and if you want to work out, you go for a walk. With the Parisian custom of tiny meals and lots of walking, people aren’t as paranoid about their health. When Gopnick finally locates a gym, he finds the staff are unprepared, lazy, and just not on task. It’s as though the employees take their duties lightly and feel no accountability to the customers.

    All over Paris he finds people either striking or complaining that they have to work. The scariest things for a Frenchman appear to be competition and the freedom of choice; they want mandatory vacations, mandatory short work hours, and massive job protections. I wish Gopnick would have looked closer to see who cleans the offices. What do the African immigrant laborers have to say?

    Christmas is a funny issue in the book, for several reasons. Firstly, the Christmas of Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and lots of presents, is more of a British-American holiday than a French one. The French aren’t going “Christmas crazy” like the Americans; no fir tree mess in the living room, no fat guy in a Santa suit, and no going broke on the presents and the decoration. A few of the big stores have a Santa Claus, but you’re not going to see lots of kids line up to sit on the guy’s knee and tell him what they want. That would be very un-French, for a child to sit in a stranger’s lap and say “I want.” To irritate the author even more, he finds that his US Christmas tree lights don’t work because the French house current will melt the bulbs. Buying them there is worse, because the French light bulbs cost three times as much. He didn’t ask the locals, but I bet they’d have said “why would I spend all that money on light bulbs that I’m only going to use once a year?”

    Paris to the Moon is good, but it lacks the bite of A Year in the Merde. I found it repetitive in that Gopnick mentions the same things over and over again, like transit strikes and apartment hunting. Since he’s an American who doesn’t speak French, he obviously has little interaction with the locals. But in contrast to earlier “foreigner in Paris” memoirs, he arrives at a time when the country has huge government welfare programs, so the living cost is higher. If he’d arrived around the time that James Baldwin was writing Notes of a Native Son, then the cost of food and lodging would’ve been cheaper.  And I bet the people in the stores would’ve been a little more eager to please.