Mon Amie Américaine

When Michèle, a Parisian woman learns her close American friend has fallen into a coma in New York, she begins writing down her thoughts, addressing her ill friend directly: “Molly, I have to talk to you.” With the diary format, Halberstadt creates intimacy and taps directly into the anxious state of mind of a person waiting for news that’s well beyond her control. There’s something girlish about the narrator, who describes her friend, a film executive (as is the narrator herself), in hyperbole: Molly is “the most sappily romantic girl I’ve ever met, my incorrigible opposite, whom I’ve always found so wonderfully unreasonable.” At first it seems the narrator is writing around her guilt, perhaps because Molly lives a single life in New York, while Michèle is ensconced in banal domesticity with her husband and two young children in Paris. But as the pages unfold, and Molly’s coma lingers, it becomes apparent that the narrator’s anxiety isn’t simply over her friend’s health; she finds herself in a state of inaction in her own life. Unfortunately, the narrator’s overblown descriptions of her friend make it hard to believe Molly is her own character, and not merely the narrator’s projection. Still, there are interesting themes of friendship and guilt in this slim volume. Halberstadt’s approach ultimately reveals that friendships are mirrors, and when bonds break, we have to reckon with sides of ourselves we may not like. (Apr.)