Le Mariage - Couverture souple

“Another wickedly clever comedy of manners... In six degrees of separation, everybody is connected, yet the coincidences are artfully managed. Johnson's crisp manipulation of the engagingly convoluted plot is rooted in her central theme of French misconceptions about Americans, and vice versa. As exemplified by Holly and Cray, even those who share the same culture habitually fail to estimate the other accurately. Johnson's barbs are sophisticated and sharp, her amused irony is easily maintained, and her finesse at narrative is as fine tuned as her cultural sensitivity and her instincts about human behavior.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Splendid entertainment... Johnson is one of our most astute cultural critics."—The New York Times Book Review

"A comic novel in the classic manner, with smart style, piquant suspense, and dog-earingly epigrammatic prose."—San Francisco Chronicle

"A witty romp."—Elle

"Johnson whips love and marriage into a frothy souffle...delicious."—Entertainment Weekly

"Like Jane Austen, Johnson delights in the worldly rituals surrounding courtship and marriage...she is a philosopher as much as a novelist."—The New Yorker

"Rich, nuanced, and highly satisfying."—Glamour
 
“Johnson is a beguiling writer, serving up catty observations with loopy good humor... near-perfect... a masterly storyteller who can pull off a storybook ending—love, joy, a trip down the aisle—without making us gag.”—Salon
 
 

Clara Holly is a former actress, beautiful, rich, and 'well married, far from her Oregon beginnings' to the renowned but reclusive film director Serge Clay. Anne-Sophie is a proper young Frenchwoman with a smart little antique stall in the Paris flea market and a wedding to plan. As the plot thickens they are all drawn into a cross between a modern Feydeau farce and a Kafkaesque nightmare, as their paths and those of a host of other characters intersect at the Cray's château. Despite murder, misunderstanding, hostage-taking and erotic encounters, however, le marriage must go ahead in the grand French style.