The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

I don't consider myself particularly well-versed in French culture: however, even I could tell, from the first few chapters of Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, that this book was going to be French with a capital F: Nothing really happens, and then one small thing happens, and life is momentarily rescued from its essential meaninglessness. Meanwhile, there are a lot of reflections on the hypocrisy of the upper class (one of the narrators says, without a hint of sarcasm, "Oh, the despicable vacuousness of bourgeois existence!"), the vulgarity of popular culture, and the inability of people to ever really connect with one another. 

If this sounds depressing, well... it is. But it is also worth reading. Barbery, a professor of philosophy, has done what few writers can: she has written a successful philosophical novel. Normally, this kind of novel suffers, because neither story nor philosophy gets adequate space. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, however, Barbery wisely chooses to go light on plot and heavy on character development, which lends itself to philosophical musings. We get the sense that these characters are deeply invested in Understanding Life, and that is what takes the book beyond mere pretension. More human than a philosophy textbook, more intellectual than most novels, this book is an engaging examination of some of life's weightiest questions: What is the meaning of existence? What, if anything, makes life worth living? What is the purpose of Art? What is Beauty? And why are rich people so uniformly stupid? 

These are the questions that haunt the book's two protagonists. Renee Michel, the primary narrator, is an aging concierge in a posh Parisian apartment. She plays the part of an ignorant working-class woman, but she is secretly a brilliant autodidact who delights in Russian literature, Japanese films, and Dutch still lives. For most of her life, she has been content to live a double life, quietly gloating over the stupidity of, well, almost everyone except her (the other exceptions include her best friend, Manuela, a Portuguese immigrant with more class than the people whose houses she cleans, and Renee's deceased husband). 

Meanwhile, five floors above her, twelve-year-old Paloma has a secret of her own. Paloma is hyper-articulate and keenly observant: her sections are some of the book's funniest, as she ruthlessly exposes her family's hypocrisy. Anyone who has been an adolescent will recognize the unhappiness behind her intolerance, and indeed, Paloma is the character for whom meaning is truly a life or death issue: if she can't find something to make life worthwhile in the next few months, she is going to commit suicide on her 13th birthday, though not before setting fire to her family's luxury apartment (no one will be there--"after all, I'm not a criminal," she explains). 

There were times when I found myself frustrated by the book's style: it is dense and slow-moving.  Indeed, this is a book that is not afraid to flex its intellectual muscles, another way in which it diverges from many American novels. (Anyone who says they read Hedgehog without looking up at least some of the words or references is almost certainly lying: eructation? phenomenology? William Ockham?) Additionally, the book's protagonists delight in life's finer things in a way that most Americans might find a bit snobby (I did, and most people think I'm a snob). When they are not exploring life's essential questions, they are succumbing to bouts of Proustian ecstasy over a rugby player's pose or the arrangement of a camilla on moss. 

But Barbery's insights, especially in the latter half of the book, when our two heroes finally meet, make the novel worth pursuing for anyone who enjoys a bit of philosophical rumination. It's not plot-driven (I'm honestly not sure the French even have a word for "plot"), and it's not exactly exciting, but it is thought-provoking. And, in the end, life is momentarily rescued from meaninglessness, and best of all, these self-absorbed, defensive characters begin to realize the necessity of compassion. To me, that was the book's saving grace: after a while, I got tired of hearing about how stupid, crass, and cruel humans are. But Renee and Paloma begin to recognize that others besides themselves may have interior lives; that others besides themselves may be sad, or searching. 

It is this injection of the human that saves the book from mere intellectual masturbation. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is, in the end, about people--all of its existential questions derive from genuine human longing. This book may be French, but the loneliness, grief, and love at its core are decidedly universal.