Book Review: Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die by Howard Waldman

Although the saying is ascribed to a number of writers, most sources cite the phrase “good Americans go to Paris when they die” to Oscar Wilde’s Woman of no Importance. For many Americans, particularly the well heeled, Paris might well be considered a kind of heaven; for others, the full irony and uncertainty of the notion of a “good American” might play out.

So what if the saying were true? What if really good — that is, well behaved and nice — Americans ended up in a kind of Parisian heaven? What if a few bad ones got there too, by administrative mistake, and were held in a kind of purgatorial camp until a decision could be made on whether they were good enough to be set free? It’s an odd premise for a book, and few authors would be able to make it work. Howard Waldman manages it. Taking his cue from Beckett and Sartre, Waldman creates a novel that is blatantly absurd, and yet somehow, it not only manages to be entertaining, funny and rich, but also pithy.

There were times, early on, when I thought Good Americans would be a painful novel to read – a kind of indefinite wait, like Waiting for Godot with no resolution -– the ultimate existentialist hell — but it isn’t like that at all. The five stranded characters grow into their circumstances, changing and progressing towards resolution. Among the women, there is the practical, always nice Helen, who survives by attempting to lose herself in whatever book she can find, coupled with deliberate stoicism, and the beautiful Margaret, both tempted and tortured by her returned youth. The men are Seymour the intellectual, Max the truck driver who has never even been to Paris (the ultimate crime), and Louis, the handsome, ascetic Marine. Trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare at the Préfecture de Police, the characters wait to see if death is permanent or if they will be allowed out into the endless springtime of their prime so they can change their bad decisions. Strange and comical as it might seem, Waldman manages to tease out the philosophical implications and complexities amidst the humour, so we end up with a read that is lighthearted and pleasurable on one level – will these characters escape, and where, exactly, are they – heaven, hell, or some kind of purgatory between? While on another level, there are all sorts of subtleties around how we get psychologically stuck in a place; about how we determine good and bad; about the arbitrary power of Bureaucracy over our lives, and even about what constitutes a life worth living/reward and above all, the intensity of nostalgia:

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of Sleep Before Evening, The Art of Assessment, Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse and She Wore Emerald Then. …

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