The Pleasing Hour - 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

"Lily King's splendid new novel consists of one beginning after another, all so assured that it's hard to believe the book itself is her debut" --The New York Times Book Review

"Delightful . . . [This] remarkably well-written book . . . introduces a very talented writer of great promise."--The Washington Post Book World

"Written with quiet, lyric forcefulness . . . An impressive debut from a writer who knows how to uncover the saving impulses of the heart."--Elle

"A rich first novel about families lost and found from a promising writer with an ear for language from the heart, that touches deeply."--The Christian Science Monitor

"King can brushes lush descriptions, with majestic colors and vivid, fleeting pleasures." --The Seattle Times

"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."--USA Today

"Brace yourself--The Pleasing Hour is an intense novel, full of secrets and complicated situations."--Seventeen

"Here, as with a palimpsest, each new form of pleasing delineated by the author is made more complex by the imprint of the last."--The New Yorker

"King brings alive a palette of colorful and robust characters that might have been collected from an afternoon sidewalk café in Provence. . . . This is a rich first novel about families lost and found from a promising writer with an ear for the kind of language--language from the heart, that touches deeply." --The Christian Science Monitor

"King's economy with detail is perfectly calibrated to the tension created by Rosie's language deficit, cultural discomfort, and emotional isolation. . . . Though she tells lean stories, King can brush lush descriptions, with majestic colors and vivid, fleeting pleasures."--The Seattle Times

"Well written, absorbing . . . [King] is an accomplished stylist, repeatedly demonstrating a fine control of her complicated structure. . . . An altogether pleasing debut."--Newsday

"The Pleasing Hour is a beautiful, sad novel that leaves a lasting impression."--New Woman

"King delivers an emotionally suspenseful story in language nearly as exquisite as the setting itself . . . The Pleasing Hour, like all intersections at which lives converge, belongs to more than one person--but ultimately it is Rosie whose emotional evolution we celebrate, and with it the arrival of Lily King to the world of bright new literary voices."--Ploughshares

"In gentle, elegant prose, first novelist King . . . has taken some unusual elements and worked them into a believable, beautifully etched tale of people who, scarred by their past, are now trying to get it right."--Library Journal

"Expertly constructed, full of surprises, superbly paced, and sweetly sad, King's book hardly reads like a first novel . . . the seamless integration of theme, plot and voice produces a rare sense of intimacy."--Publishers Weekly

"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."--Booklist

"Intriguing...the central character's complexity and many of the descriptive details are pleasing."--Kirkus Reviews

"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." --Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body

"This is a lovely book, elegant and wise, full of illuminations about France, and families, and love." --Roxana Robinson, author of This Is My Daughter and Summer Light

"Lily King has written a luminous first novel. Her psychology is original and subtle, her mise en scene perfect, her deft and lovely language and gentle humor irresistible. The Pleasing Hour is a find, and a joy." --Beth Gutcheon, author of Saying Grace and Five Fortunes

"In this lovely, subtle debut novel, Lily King writes with delicacy and wisdom of inner and outer lives, of exclusion, loneliness, and survival. The music of her writing is a deliciousness in itself. She sees with a rare discernment, an insight as profound and surprising as it is graceful and forgiving, and understands the complex structures invented by the will to love. In The Pleasing Hour, she imbues love's insistent forms--its misbegotten, maternal, and romantic powers--with a poignancy that enchants." --Alice Fulton, author of Sensual Math