AMERICAN STRANGER
A
Novel
By David Plante
Brought up in a secularized
Jewish household on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Nancy Green knows little about
her parents’ past. She knows they were World War II Jewish refugees who were
able to escape Germany with precious family heirlooms that are constant
reminders of a lost life and a world about which Nancy knows very little.
In David Plante’s novel, AMERICAN STRANGER (Delphinium Books; January 9, 2018) the
longing Nancy has for some kind of spiritual connection first leads her into an
encounter with a Hasidic Jewish man who, unable to find meaning in his own
religion, has taken vows to become a monk. She then becomes romantically
involved with Yvon, a Catholic college student in Boston where she is studying
for her master’s degree in English literature. Yvon, trying to escape the
clutches of Catholicism and his overbearing mother, finds temporary refuge in
Nancy and sees her as an escape from the insular enclave of Franco-Americans
where he has spent most of his life. Their highly erotic, tempestuous
relationship frightens both of them until a tragedy in Yvon’s life eventually
pulls them apart.
Devastated by the breakup,
Nancy ends up marrying a Jewish man from London, hoping to find herself with a
man of her own religion. However, her new relationship pales in comparison to
her deep emotional connection with Yvon and, sadly, ends, inspiring Nancy to go
back to Boston to track down the man who, she realizes, is the great love of
her life.
David Plante grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, within a French-Canadian
parish that was palisaded by its language, a French that dated from the time of
the first French colonists in the early 17th Century to what was then most of
North America, la Nouvelle France. His background was very similar to that of
Jack Kerouac, who was brought up in a French speaking parish in Lowell,
Massachusetts. Plante has been inspired to write novels rooted in La Nouvelle
France, most notably in The Family, a contender for the National
Book Award. As a young man, Plante moved to London, where he lived for some
fifty years, years in part accounted for in his memoirs Becoming a Londoner and Worlds
Apart and in The Pure Lover, an elegy to his forty-year
relationship with Nikos Stangos. He has published a number of novels, some
referring back to his parish but also expanding into European and Russian
settings. He has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker with short
stories and profiles of people he knew, including the painter Francis Bacon,
the aesthete Harold Acton, and the historian Steven Runciman. His renowned
book, Difficult Women, a non-fiction work that profiled Jean Rhys,
Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer is being reissued by The New York Review of
Books Press in 2017. He has dual nationality, American and British, but lives
in Lucca, Italy, and Athens, Greece.
AMERICAN
STRANGER
A Novel
By David Plante
Delphinium Books: January 9, 2018
$24.95 Hardcover; 256 pages
ISBN: 978-1-88-328573-9