The Pleasing Hour: A Novel - Softcover

The Pleasing Hour is as sensuous and ambling as a river in summer. With great delicacy, it tells how Rosie, a 19-year-old American comes to Paris to be an au pair for Marc and Nicole and their three children and recasts the family and their love. While other au pairs want to acquire fluency and a Parisian accent, Rosie needs to escape from her recent decision to act as a surrogate mother for her infertile sister. She is "guarded, flinchless", her breasts leak and she's "big and unspectacular, nothing like the cinema samples". In the home of the elegant and abrasive Nicole, she feels inconvenient and judged. King excels as she conveys the awkward peculiarity of the au pair job, which places you "en famille", while denying any real and lasting access to its intimacies. Rosie is brilliantly placed to dissect the snobbery and bourgeois concerns that Parisians are so good at and King hits the mark with wit and accuracy as the family reveal their subtle and not so subtle anti- Americanisms. As Rosie becomes a confidante, the characters develop in dimensionality and sympathy. Guillaume, the youngest, nurses unfashionable fervour for the priesthood; Lola needs love and sensitivity and misses nothing; while Odile, the eldest, begins to become aware of her desire for other girls. Despite Marc's bad posture and splayed feet, Rosie finds herself attracted to him and their adultery is handled in fresh, erotic and unexpected ways. As Nicole attains the uncanny perceptiveness of the deceived, Rosie chooses to protect her from the kind of loss she herself has suffered and leaves for Provence, to take care of an elderly woman, who once cared for Nicole. Only through this second sacrifice does Rosie learn what she needs and wants and also learns from the older woman why Nicole is so self- protected.

King weaves a complex and intricate set of relationships with humour and emotional insight. The surprising shifts in alliances and loyalties are convincingly told and avoid the common traps of sentimentality and melodrama. It's both a well-toned and languid novel set against the dreamy backdrop of "the pleasing hour", the lilac light of a French dusk. -- Cherry Smyth

Roxana Robinson Author of This Is My Daughter and Summer Light This is a lovely book, elegant and wise, full of illuminations about France, and families, and love. Phillip Lopate Author of Portrait of My Body This is a deft and moving novel, with grace notes and shocks of recognition on every page. Elegant, sensual, and, above all, aware, it offers a stunningly dramatic presentation of ambivalences and reconciliations. You feel wisdom in these sentences, and care for the truth. Tim Lemire Tab (Boston) A literary first novel of impressive layering and complexity, the kind of debut you might expect from the winner of the Raymond Carver Prize for fiction. Kirkus Reviews Intriguing...the central character's complexity and many of the descriptive details are pleasing. Booklist With longing and sweetness, this subtle and gorgeously crafted novel takes us into a tangle of family affections...the play of French against American, of fresh hurts against old but still aching ones, of lovers and mothers, is gently woven in language of great purity. Publishers Weekly Expertly constructed, full of surprises, superbly paced, and sweetly sad, King's book hardly reads like a first novel. Heller McAlpin Newsday Well written, absorbing....She is an accomplished stylist, repeatedly demonstrating a fine control of her complicated structure, which zigzags in time....An altogether pleasing debut. Karen Shepard USA Today Beautifully wrought...what people do to each other and the legacies they leave are King's central subjects, and in her deft hands they're explored in complicated, ambitious ways that leave us feeling as if we've become fluent in a foreign language. Lelia Ruckenstein The Washington Post Delightful...This remarkably well-written book will please you with its funny and sad tale of cultural differences, love, betrayal, and motherhood....Introduces a very talented writer of great promise. Lisa Shea Elle [An] impressive debut from a writer who knows how to uncover the saving impulses of the heart.