Rendezvous mit Alice

The first love affair most of us have is with our mothers. In The Rendezvous, 18-year-old Louise sits in the Parisian cafe where her divorced parents met, whiling away a long, fruitless wait for her mother, Alice, by replaying scenes from their lives. Gorgeous, absentee Alice is a supreme narcissist and completely unconvincing liar who dabbles in hard drugs and spends time in prison. Though Louise affects a dispassionate cool as she conjures her up, her descriptions are those of a jilted suitor still longing for the lover who razed her heart. Alice is enticingly wild and generous, too, a horrendous parent but a shining chimera who goes up in flames with a grin. Translated from French and billed as a roman à clef that is "part memoir, part fiction," this debut novel by Justine Levy, the daughter of French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy, is slight in scope but addictive and elegant, even as the scenes inscribed rival those in Bosch's paintings of hell.