Snob Appeal

The Elegance of the Hedgehog a novel by Muriel Barbery.  Europa Editions.  325 pp.  $17.00  ***

The Elegance of the Hedgehog concerns two people who, for different reasons, have cut themselves off from humanity.  Renee is the concierge of a large wealthy apartment building in Paris, and she looks the part.  Dumpy, unkempt, in her early fifties, she runs the place efficiently and does what the job demands, but is secretly critical of the wealthy, empty-headed people who surround her.  She’s a fierce autodidact, of all kinds of culture, literature, philosophy, music, art, while the tenants of her building, who have all the advantages, ignore these things.  Renee is an intellectual snob, convinced that all she knows and understands makes her superior to those around her.  In a way, of course, it does.  But it also leads her to deny their humanity, and not see them as human beings.  Her cultural pursuits are a refuge, but she’s a bitter person.

Twelve-year-old Paloma is similarly snobbish and superior.  She lives in the building, and though her parents—and her older sister—have all the right liberal attitudes, she finds them neurotic and annoying and has decided life is absurd.  She’s resolved that on her next birthday she’ll kill herself and set the apartment on fire.  That’ll show ‘em..

These two have not connected as the novel opens.  Renee speaks to the reader directly, while Paloma records her thoughts in two kinds of journal entries, Profound Thoughts and Journal of the Movement of the World.  We can see these two characters are on a collision course.  They’re too perfect a match.

What brings them together is most unusual.  One of the building residents dies, and instead of passing the apartment on to another family member, as most do, this family sells it to a wealthy Japanese man, Kokura Ozu.  Paloma is studying Japanese and avidly reads manga, while Renee is enamored of Japanese cinema.  They’re both entranced at the thought of this man entering the building and touching their lives.

He’s vastly wealthy, redoes the entire fourth floor before he moves in.  When he meets the concierge and finds her dog is named Leo, he makes an illusion to Tolstoy that she picks up on, and is intrigued at the thought that his concierge is a cultured woman.  Renee, on the other hand, is troubled that she made herself known.  She doesn’t like feeling vulnerable in the face of wealth.  Paloma, in the meantime, got stuck in the elevator with M. Ozu, and has allowed him to correct her Japanese pronunciation.  Soon he is having her and a young friend to tea, and has made friendly overtures toward Renee as well.

My favorite sentence is one that Renee speaks about the man: “What is both disconcerting and marvelous about Kakuro Ozu is that he combines a sort of childish enthusiasm and candor with the attentiveness and kindliness of an old sage.”  That captures the man perfectly.  He’s the only person of the three who doesn’t think his cultural attainments make him superior.  Both Renee and Paloma have a lot to learn from the way he carries himself and behaves toward others.

One suspects that author Muriel Barbery, a former philosophy professor, might have struggled with the same feelings of cultural superiority, or at least encountered them.  There is a suggestion that something about being Asian, or being Japanese, has led Ozu to a different attitude.  First he invites Renee to dinner at his place, then to tea (she supplies the pastries, baked by her close friend Manuela, a servant in the building), and eventually out to dinner.  Renee keeps banging up against her suspicions of wealth, but he gracefully overcomes some of them, and Paloma, who has taken to hanging out with the concierge, addresses the rest.  It turns out that Renee has a personal, historical reason for her uneasiness, a past event in her family life, and Paloma—perhaps just because she is so young—can see beyond it.

Now I would like to talk about the ending, and this definitely includes a spoiler.  If you prefer to be surprised, you should stop here.

This book is an odd mix of the intellectual—there were passages, like an early discussion of Husserl, that went right over my head—and the sentimental.  It’s a poignant story that verges on being a tear-jerker.  It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is about how an Eastern sage, with his lightness of touch, enlightens a pair of Europeans who are trapped in an intellectual snobbery that is every bit as damaging as the social snobbery that surrounds them.  Everybody has their defenses up, and Ozu has a way of freeing people from that, seeing everyone the same way.

He literally frees Renee, makes her see that she doesn’t have to be trapped in the persona she has created, the fierce grumpy judgmental concierge who is actually a towering intellectual.  That moment of freedom seems a perfect resolution to the story.  But Barbery goes for the jugular and has Renee get hit by a truck and die just as she realizes her freedom.  That didn’t quite ruin the novel for me, but it came close.  It’s bad enough that Renee has spent 54 years of her life isolating herself from much of humanity.  Snatching her life from her at the moment she finds freedom is a plot twist worthy of O’Henry.

I don’t mean that in a good way.  Barbery took a potential work of art and made it into a soap opera.