French Lessons

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/books/review/saira-shahs-mouse-proof-kitchen.html

Version 0 of 1.

There’s an arresting photograph on the cover of the paperback edition of “The Storyteller’s Daughter,” Saira Shah’s memoir of her adventures in war-torn Afghanistan — an Afghan boy in a turban, regarding the viewer with a shrewdly inquisitive expression. The “boy” is Shah herself, the daughter of the celebrated Sufi fabulist Idries Shah. Born in England in 1964, she returned at age 21 to her father’s homeland, then under Soviet occupation. Disguised as a young man, braving frostbite and Russian missiles, she reported back to English newspapers and television on the American-backed mujahedeen, who were importing, as she put it, “a brand of extremist political Islam that . . . had been almost unknown inside Afghanistan.”

For nearly two decades, Shah worked as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, winning Emmys for her coverage of war zones from Gaza to Afghanistan. But in 2003, she gave up filmmaking and moved to southern France, where she and her partner now live with their severely disabled daughter. “The Mouse-Proof Kitchen,” her first novel, is a fictional reworking of this latest chapter in a life marked by pluck, hardship and adventure.

The novel’s narrator, Anna, is a London chef married to Tobias, a composer of music for films and television documentaries. Anna is careful and orderly, her husband a lazy charmer. Together they decide to realize a dream common to many middle-class Britons sick of gray drizzle and emboldened by the disparity between property prices in England and France: they will sell their flat and settle in the French countryside once Anna, now pregnant, delivers their baby.

“My plans are laid,” Anna informs us. “All will be well. In southern France, the sun will shine kindly on us. The people will be friendly. Our daughter will grow up bilingual, sophisticated, safe from pedophiles. She won’t need the latest Nike trainers; she won’t eat junk. I can see the house we’ll buy: a cottage in Provence with roses and hollyhocks around the door, a field of lavender dotted with olive trees, the deep blue of the sea merging into the azure sky.”

All, of course, does not turn out so well. Since Provence is now almost as pricey as Islington, the couple is forced westward into the harsher hinterland of the Languedoc, where Tobias sweet-talks Anna into buying Les Rajons, a hilltop wreck with staggering views and, the locals hint, a tragic past. Southern France, they discover, is a rancorously xenophobic place, bristling with feuds old and new — between farmers over scarce water, between families with roots in the Resistance and those of former collaborators, between right-wing boar hunters and hippie dropouts. The workmen Anna summons to attend to Les Rajons’ leaking roof and “nonexistent” plumbing quote prices she can’t afford, then tell her “they don’t want the work anyway.” The mice that have overrun the house gnaw their way through everything from Nutella jars to electrical wiring. Tobias’s latest commission risks falling through; Anna’s plans to open a cooking school are stymied.

There is a deeper horror, however, darkening the couple’s idyll. Freya, their “beautiful,” “perfect” baby, has been born with a brain “like scrambled eggs” and a “shopping list” of disabilities, including a tendency to have frequent seizures. As the doctors struggle to assess what seems to be an unusually catastrophic case of cerebral palsy, Anna and Tobias are left wondering whether their daughter will ever recognize them, let alone be able to roll over, breathe or feed herself unaided. The quandaries they face — should they try not to get too “attached” to Freya, since she may not pull through, or would it be worse if she did survive? — threaten to capsize their marriage and destroy any previous notions of what constitutes an acceptable life.

These are the two intertwined dramas that make up “The Mouse-Proof Kitchen”: the unsuitable house, the unsuitable baby. Although at no time does either Anna or Tobias seem to consider putting Les Rajons back on the market, they do often contemplate — and even make halfhearted stabs at — returning their child to the shop.

In “The Storyteller’s Daughter,” Shah managed to impart a wry humor to her war-zone encounters with gun runners, spies and preening tribal rulers. Humor in “The Mouse-Proof Kitchen” becomes a still more anarchically life-affirming response to disaster. What might well, as the author has acknowledged in interviews, have been a “misery memoir” is instead a gutsy recital of all the wildly inappropriate jokes, crockery smashing, extramarital dalliances and unheroic efforts to escape child care in which two terminally stressed-out parents can indulge.

It’s cathartic to read of Tobias’s proposal that they leave their little darling in the hospital and flee to Brazil, or of Anna’s mad dash to an I.V.F. clinic to see if she can conceive a new baby from a less tainted sperm donor than her feckless husband. It’s cathartic to read of Tobias — after his wife has spent the night trying to calm Freya, who has screamed for eight hours — whining when she serves him instant coffee. Luckily, like most functioning couples, one of them tends to find new reserves of endurance just when the other is saying, “It’s me or her.” Luckily, there’s a motley cast of relatives, old friends, medical staffers and eccentric Languedoc neighbors to ease this journey of the heart — the most colorful being Anna’s crankily narcissistic mother, who is given to wondering if they can’t simply “train” Freya. (“After all, you can even train a slug.”)

Shah writes with sensuous passion of the Languedoc’s climatic plagues and bounties, and the husbandry required to deal with them. As the novel proceeds through the seasons of her family’s first year in France, Anna, working from the wartime recipe book of a local Resistance heroine who previously lived at Les Rajons, struggles to convert cherries, figs and damask roses into jams, which must then be funneled into jars sturdy enough to withstand the marauding mice. This battle against nature’s chaos is set in deft counterpoint to Freya’s struggle to survive, with her parents realizing that even as their daughter blossoms into a smiling cuddly creature, her “fitting” is becoming more frequent, her ability to feed or digest diminishing.

The fragmentary, journal-like format of “The Mouse-Proof Kitchen” makes for an invigorating rhythm of quick cuts among its subplots as Anna and Tobias forge a richly haphazard life on this unpromising soil. Unfortunately, despite Shah’s knack for pacing and suspense, her novel is uneven. There’s too glaring a discrepancy between what she knows inside out (be it French cultural values or the heartbreak of mothering a radically “incomplete” child) and the high melodrama of the overly contrived plot, between the characters Shah wholeheartedly believes in and those who open their mouths only to offer her heroine sage advice — or to reveal, at critical moments, long-hidden secrets about the Nazi occupation.

“Sometimes life gets a little messy” was the phrase inscribed on the cover of the advance copies of “The Mouse-Proof Kitchen.” If Shah hadn’t felt compelled to tie up every loose end in a bow, this novel would be as powerful as it is engaging.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> Fernanda Eberstadt’s most recent book is a novel, “Rat.”