How to Be a French Girl is deceptive. Rose Cleary’s debut novel follows a nameless receptionist, who, on the basis of very little interaction, falls in love with Gustave, a French businessman. This could have led to a familiar tale: from online flirting to relationship-gone-wrong. Instead, after a failed evening together, she pursues Gustave to Paris – a move that’s met with derision and, increasingly, fear. She convinces Gustave’s daughter to pose for a series of artworks, her motivation moving from lust to something more sinister. Her campaign of harassment threatens Gustave’s extended family, and soon her own grip on reality.
Like many of its contemporaries, How to Be a French Girl is perceptive on those two modern concerns: dating and identity. Cleary exposes the amount of work it takes to appear carefree, and how abasing it is to fall for someone. Our character Googles “french girl style” over and over again, buying the “crisp white shirt” that the bloggers recommend. Even the title of the book feels intentionally embarrassing: I hoped that strangers on the Tube didn’t think it was a guide to nailing Parisian chic.
And there’s a touch of Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts about How to Be a French Girl: both novels draw parallels between image-obsession and violence. As in Boy Parts, Cleary’s protagonist, who’d hoped to become a sculptor, is concerned with the desire and disappointment of being an artist. She’s jealous of her best friend’s commercial success; bitter at her own lack of resources; worse, afraid that the limiting factor to her abortive artistic career has been herself. But there’s knowing levity, too: the book is portioned out by place, and the first, declarative section – “LONDON” – begins abruptly in Southend, where the protagonist lives. It’s a distinction she frets about, and it indicates a whole raft of cultural and economic discrepancies that are deftly left to our inference.
Cleary guides us from the familiar realm of poor decision-making to a more extreme self-sabotage. In a narrative set up as “relatable”, this shift might have seemed like a failing, except that destruction – of a life, of the plot you expect – is ultimately revealed to be the point. How to Be a French Girl isn’t really a searing indictment of 21st-century life, so much as a sickly fable. The penniless artist is not to be romanticised, Cleary says – no matter how hard they themselves might try.
How to Be a French Girl is published by Weatherglass at £11.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Books
