La Reine-Mère is called so not because she's a queen mother but because her name is Reine, and she's the mother of three more or less grown kids: Viviane who's a shrink with (to Reine at first, and then almost to the whole family) an awful husband lawyer Thierry; a younger son Vincent, a painter who's shacked up with a scatty philo student Linda, who's not interested in their son Clovis, no more than she's interested in tidying up or doing the washing; and finally the militant (and almost violent) animal welfarist Camille, who changes boyfriends very regularly.
So we have a family story, although not really a greatly disfunctional one. Apart, that is, from Diego, Reine's loutish former husband who's disappeared from the scene (except in brief flashbacks) a long time before the book starts, and the orgy-loving Thierry who disappears from the book about halfway in after Viviane discovers pornographic photos of him in action. Oh, and Linda runs off too, but then that was to be foreseen, and she was hardly a member of the family anyway.
No, this isn't a disfunctional family, it's a family in which the members care for each other, especially for Reine towards the beginning when she stabs a yob in the solar plexis with her keys near the Saint-Michel fountain at five in the morning, when Reine's dog l'Oiseau (as a small puppy, he looked like a blackbird when she picked him up from SPA) decides he wants to go walkies.
The yob of course survived, but here an element of France in the 1980s is clearly brought to light: along with the motor-bikes parked around the fountain at Saint-Michel, this is where drug addicts are plainly visible, where – as her progeny keep telling Reine in their morbid stories of muggings and casual murder, etc – modern life is dangerous, frightening, full of menace around every corner. But Viviane, Vincent and Camille all rally round, protecting her.
So we have a novel of the ups and downs of family life and the horrors that the outside world holds. We also have sympathetic friends, frequent slap-up meals, and beautifully sketched characters. So, a successful book then. Er, no.
As a novel it is highly enjoyable half of the time, but about halfway in I wondered where it was leading, what I was expecting. In fact, the book could have ended there and I wouldn't have missed anything. It just seems to go nowhere, only the characters hold it together, there's no momentum. A very odd book.
Christine de Rivoyre died on 3 January 2019. I saw a two-minute clip of a very young newscaster announcing her death, saying that many young people wouldn't remember her. At 97, Christine de Rivoyre had a long life, but it seems a relatively short literary one.
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