Nouvel Observateur reporter Jean-Paul Dubois (translated by Linda Coverdale) leans heavily on John Updike with liberal doses of the early Phillip Roth to present a portrait of middle class French life from the après-guerre to the present.

Paul Blick: born in France (but not Paris); son of a car dealer; provincial sociology student-cum-theoretical revolutionary; rioter of ’68; married soon thereafter; briefly employed (by his father-in-law); soon to discover adultery and other satisfactions of a desperate househusband as consort of a high-flying wife who conquers the world as CEO of a Jacuzzi-manufacturing company.

This not-so-extraordinary Frenchman is delivered to the not-so-extraordinary awareness of having arrived in middle age more a product of his times, his country, and blind chance than a creature of his own free will. A fluke—wild commercial success as a photographer of trees—will give him, for a time, the belated illusion of self-fulfillment. But when this exalting respite passes (along with the unaccountable vogue for tree photography), Paul finds himself again a man more acted upon than acting, until the worst imaginable catastrophe forces him to see how feeble his powers to imagine the worst have heretofore been. And ever after there will be no avoiding the harder facts of life at the dawn of the twenty-first century.