Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932: A Novel
by Francine Prose
HarperCollins. 448 pages, $26.99
CROSS DRESSERS, artists, poets, writers, jaded chanteuses, fabulously wealthy aristocrats, brilliant conversations, and an endless flow of magnums of champagne converge in Paris, that “City of Light.” Starving multitudes, unheated garrets, anti-Semitic mobs calling for blood, degenerates, falling-down drug addicts, and dark foreshadowings of fascist atrocities to come also converge in Paris, a city of darkness as well.
Both Parises figure prominently in Francine Prose’s new epic novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. Spanning more than twenty years, the novel depicts the lives of various characters that offer their perspectives on each other’s lives as well as the historical moment. The work is a psychological and social portrait of France between the wars. Loosely based on the lives of various historical figures such as Henry Miller and the photographer known as Brassaï, the novel also features a bored baroness, a world-weary cabaret owner, and an assortment of lost souls who float through Paris. Even Picasso makes an appearance. The story is told in alternating narratives from all of the major characters, a technique that’s reminiscent of montage filmmaking whereby separate snippets of film are pieced together to create a narrative.
But Prose’s larger project involves an examination of the psychological underpinnings of the central character, Lou Villars, who’s clearly based upon the real-life person Violette Morris, a racecar driver who was a lesbian and sometime cross- dresser. Violette is one of the two subjects, along with her female lover, who appear in a famous photo by Brassaï known as Lesbian Couple at Le Monocle, 1932. Prose painstakingly unspools Villars’ life from girlhood to racecar driver to spy for the Nazis and Gestapo torturer at the infamous 93, rue Lauriston, Paris. The novel describes how Villars justified her embrace of Nazism and the Vichy regime as an act of patriotism, likening herself to Joan of Arc. Believing that Jews and Communists were polluting French culture, she saw her mission as one of purifying France of these contaminating elements.
The deeper reasons for Villars’ turn to fascism remain an enigma. From her bizarre childhood on, she saw herself as an outsider. She was a fantastic athlete and racecar driver who was prevented from pursuing these avenues as a professional due to her gender. She was a lesbian and cross-dresser who was thwarted in love. Yet she identified with a political movement that was expressly misogynistic and homophobic. By embracing fascism she apparently found “a place at the table” where she enjoyed a measure of power and status—for a time. But this scarcely explains her terrible moral decisions at a time when being an outsider was the very thing that led to your persecution.
Prose has written a big book which at times can seem like the Cecil B. DeMille version of Paris in the ’30s, full of wide-angle shots and clichés about the Parisian demimonde and Bohemia (“divine decadence” and all that). But seen through the eyes of the novel’s central characters, notably Lou Villars, this world takes on a depth and breadth that justifies the novel’s sweeping ambitions.
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Irene Javors is a psychotherapist and writer who lives in NYC. She is the author of Culture Notes: Essays on Sane Living (2010).
