Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

Prose’s 21st novel (after The Turning) captures the brilliance of Paris’s bohemian art scene in the ’20s and ’30s, as well as the dark days that followed. Louisianne “Lou” Villars, a talented athlete, travels to Paris as a teenager, hoping to someday compete in the Olympics, but instead she ends up checking coats at the Chameleon Club, famed around the city for its gender-defying patrons and cabaret. Lou’s real-life model is Violette Morris, a cross-dressing professional race car driver turned Nazi spy, immortalized in Brassaï’s iconic photograph, Lesbian Couple at le Monocle, 1932. The novel follows Lou as she falls in and out of love, becomes a professional race car driver, and dines with the Führer in Berlin. This story is told piecemeal through the frequently unreliable and self-serving recollections of Lou’s friends—among them the visionary and egotistical photographer Gabor Tsenyi; Lily de Rossignol, Gabor and Lou’s benefactress; and Nathalie Dunois, Lou’s biographer. The novel skillfully portrays the headiness of Parisian cafes, where artists and writers came together to talk and cadge free drinks, and the terror of the Nazi Occupation. Though the momentum lags at times, Prose deftly demonstrates with a wink the self-seeking nature of memory and the way we portray our past. (May)