...it’s hilarious and it’s about the travails of people with more money than sense ... deWitt — who bills his delightful novel as a 'tragedy of manners' — owes more to Edith Wharton than Austen ... DeWitt’s characters behave with the precision and affectlessness of the people in Wes Anderson films ... DeWitt is aiming for farce and to say something about characters who cannot get out of their own way, and he achieves both with élan.
In his new novel, French Exit, deWitt serves up a modern story, a satire about an insouciant widow on a quest for refined self-immolation. The novel engages the tropes of the comedy of manners ... DeWitt’s surrealism is cheerful and matter-of-fact, making the novel feel as buoyantly insane as its characters ... DeWitt is a stealth absurdist, with a flair for dressing up rhyme as reason. His best dialogue is decorous, with a preposterous thrust ... Death suffuses French Exit, lending the book shape and perfume ... In its preoccupation with the macabre, the book feels insistent but polite, like a waiter at a Michelin-starred restaurant gently drawing one’s attention to the bill ... My quibble with French Exit is that it fails to commit in its last act: as true nullity beckons, the tone shifts, becoming more tender and pathetic.
...a sparkling dark comedy that channels both Noel Coward's wit and Wes Anderson's loopy sensibility. DeWitt's tone is breezy, droll, and blithely transgressive ... DeWitt ultimately works his spirited narrative around to some sober points about the lasting effects of insufficient love. But French Exit doesn't bear too much serious scrutiny. It works better on the comic level than the tragic.
This smart, very nearly smart-alecky social comedy rewards casual fiction readers with a load of fun ... Readers will be reminded of Peter Mayles’ French-oriented fiction, which means that deWitt’s delightful novel is made of high-grade chocolate.
Patrick deWitt has great fun with this premise. He populates the story with such characters ... If French Exit doesn’t always reach the zany heights it strives for, it’s still an entertaining portrait of people who are obsessed with the looming specter of death and who don’t quite feel part of the time they were born into.
The opening scene of Patrick deWitt’s French Exit is so perfectly staged that a curtain seems to rise on his elegant creation ... The reader too may be a little confused. This certainly does not seem like a Patrick deWitt novel ... What’s more, these characters belong in a Noel Coward play ... Within a few sentences, the comic brilliance that sparked deWitt’s earlier adventures ignites this 'tragedy of manners' ... Wisecracks detonate throughout French Exit warding off sentimentality. Indeed, the novel is so mannered, so arch, that even intimate moments are barbed with slyly traded quips.
Patrick DeWitt’s compact French Exit is a sly little packet of witty observation and dark humor. It’s a pleasurable read, mainly because it’s quickly digestible, fitfully funny, and oh so artfully composed ... This detachment, as self-consciously wry as a Mayfair dinner anecdote, dominates the narrative. How the novel appeals to the individual reader may hinge on his or her appreciation or tolerance for this unremitting tone ... Book clubs and Portland/Brooklyn hipsters alike may warm to this absurdist and faintly condescending novel for its many charms. Ultimately, though, it comes across as a spinning top of paper-thin absurdity and warmed-over comic conventions; of reversals of expectation slipped through with wry nonchalance; of satire bled dry of bite; and of death drained of impact.
DeWitt writes in a gorgeously relaxed, freeform style, dabbing a clause here, a phrase there. The book is studded with tiny pleasures (a lizard 'performing important push-ups') and urbane aphorisms ('Frances had come to think of gift-giving as a polite form of witchcraft'), as well as dialogue to relish ... French Exit trades in surfaces rather than depths, but DeWitt’s particular comic genius is to evoke the darkness behind the dazzle. The novel is a brittle, unsettling delight...
Do not be fooled by how disarmingly funny Patrick deWitt’s latest novel is. Though you will likely find yourself laughing out loud on numerous occasions while reading French Exit (assuming you enjoyed the author’s previous work or have a decent sense of humour), the book is a bleak, heartbreaking tragedy of the first order ...While we are following the self-inflicted downfall of Frances and Malcolm and getting pulled into their relationships with the other characters, deWitt subtly yet explicitly jabs at us to pay attention to the grander themes of humility, generosity, and even finding one’s purpose in life. The fact that he does so while making us snort in amusement renders the experience that much more enriching. With French Exit, deWitt proves that while The Sisters Brothers may have made his name as an author, it was far from a singular success.
...meandering but markedly funny ... Depending on your appetite for drawing room shenanigans, here’s where the book picks up speed while simultaneously shedding some of its credibility or common sense. Instead of a story about a scorned woman’s renewal, what we’re met with is the riotous tragedy of (ill) manners so promised in the book’s unobtrusive subtitle ... By the time the novel’s grand finale rolls around, we’re not so much surprised by its punch line — especially given the book’s title and opening sentence — as we are slightly bewildered by its lead-up. Maybe that’s kind of the point? ... French Exit might not resonate with everyone in need of a sure or consistent path forward. But there’s one thing that’s certain — and it’s what kept this reviewer hooked.
I’ll read every book Patrick deWitt writes ... The common element is deWitt’s wonderfully aslant window into these varied worlds, and how he casts black humor and surrealist streaks of magic onto familiar literary terrains ... French Exit’s Manhattan milieu evokes midcentury writers like Salinger and Cheever ... French Exit’s bone-dry prose isn’t as funny as deWitt’s earlier work, either, and the story’s thematic undercurrents only appear, faintly, at the very end ... It’s suspenseful and creepy and weirdly emotional, and one hopes deWitt’s next book might have more stuff along those lines ... deWitt’s writing is always intriguingly off-center, even when he’s riffing on established tropes.
He gives French Exit a delicious brittleness; you come to care about these spiky characters in spite of yourself, not because the narrator thinks you should. The Prices aren’t cuddly—Frances has a 'searching, malevolent flicker in her eye;' Malcolm is a casual thief (he meets his girlfriend while stealing her dead father’s watch from a bedroom during a party)—but they’re good company. Here’s hoping they’ll be back.
Depicting all this with measured social realism is very much not what deWitt is all about. What he aims for, and often achieves, is a kind of deadpan zaniness ... there’s also a great deal of funny, knowing dialogue ... One danger of this sort of writing is superciliousness: the sense you get from, say, early Beckett that the writer feels superior to the footling conventions of realistic fiction. To his credit, deWitt doesn’t give off that feeling ... deWitt runs into another danger — that of cuteness. As he looks more seriously at his characters’ alienation from their own feelings and from society at large, and even offers them a minimal redemption, against a stylised European backdrop, it’s hard not to reach for comparisons with Wes Anderson ... Another problem is that deWitt doesn’t seem 100 per cent fluent in the wordy, old-fashioned style he sets out to parody. Sometimes the clunkiness seems deliberate and inspired .... Quite often, though, it’s hard to tell whether he’s making an arch joke about pretentious word-use, or if he’s simply landed on the wrong word.
...[a] sharply observed moments give deWitt’s well-written novel more depth than the usual comedy of manners—a depth reinforced by the exit that closes the tale, sharp object and all. Reminiscent at points of The Ginger Man but in the end a bright, original yarn with a surprising twist.
