A Bistro of One's Own

"Like many of his generation, he had very little good to say about the French – an odd lot who couldn't even understand cricket. But he did admit that they knew their way around the kitchen..." Mayle, from French Lessons








The Mayle character has several things in common each of his books, whether fiction or non-fiction. There is always the past career, which seemed to swallow protagonist whole, often hectic, very demanding, quite chatty and seemingly hollow altogether but that held the attention of Simon, or whatever name, because of its creative promise. He was a creative trapped inside a popularity contest, always with one wishful eye on a future life that might allow for that creative self to full emerge, be what it needed to be...and it had to have the place! Here is where the Provence books come in – they are deceivingly real, despite the cover make-up and despite the subject material of coming to a new land, full of potential romance. We can't forget that the book is actually stocked with complaint: the mistral, the leaky pipes, the slow to action workmen, the visitors (the very ones that they had tried to escape). Escape, of course, being the key concept throughout: to escape the gray drudgery of the English Channel and moving toward the mostly sunny delights of the south  of France. It's this nugget of desire that informs Mayle's work: it is grown up romance in this way. Adults do continue to hold on tightly to those remote nuggets of romance left in the mind but that we often don't have it in is us to full realize these because so much of it has been drained by...previous careers, for example. It is the place itself that becomes the romance, the characters are new, if often somewhat disgruntled; they are not depicted as necessarily menacing but harbor a certain instinctual locality that cannot be pierced by your own foreign projections onto them. And there is the food and the drink...this also helps. What better way to preserve the romance of place than to sing along the journey with the assistance of a little French wine and dabbling away at every charcuterie you find on the web of rues? All of this is captured by a voice that tries to charm not harm. Cultural criticism never makes it much further than a jocular ribbing. It is universally accepted to make fun of self and other as long as it is not intended to either elevate oneself too far or denigrate the other too low. Mayle does this superbly, with a witty but innocent voice, humorous but not simple gunnery or sentiment. These are cultural cues that are no doubt hard to create for oneself. It is either there or it is not. For my own Bistro of One's Own, it becomes an investment in time and energy. The world circles around in its slapdash way, full of plans and difficulties, but underneath it the writer has to stave those things off long enough to shoe horn in the light voice of the mild humorist. We need luck, time, and a lot of commitment.