The Wide World

Lemaitre (Mirror of Our Sorrows) charts in his overlong latest the crimes and scandals of a French family spread across the globe in the years after WWII. It’s 1946, and Jean Pelletier, the oldest of three brothers, is an abject failure, trapped in a loveless marriage and running his father’s Beirut-based soap-making conglomerate into the ground. After he indiscriminately murders a young woman, he and his wife move to France, where he goes on to kill three more young women. When his brother François, a journalist in Paris, begins publishing a series of articles about one of Jean’s victims, a French movie star, in 1948, his secret threatens to come to light. Meanwhile in Saigon, youngest brother Étienne is grieving his lover’s untimely death and determined to expose a major currency trafficking scandal. Lemaitre’s postwar historical narrative spans various family members across three continents, though he reserves his sharpest words and keenest emotions for Étienne’s story (“Here in Indochina... murder is simply part of the grammar,” remarks a character sardonically). Unfortunately, the meandering narrative doesn’t quite have enough momentum to keep readers hanging on, and significant events are resolved in a less-than-satisfactory manner. This lengthy family saga ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of Lemaitre’s interwar novels. Agent: Editions Calmann-Levy, Philippe Robinet. (Dec.)