THE MARTINS

A novelist searches for the subject of his next book on the streets of Paris and discovers an unlikely heroine in an elderly stranger.

Writer’s block isn’t a challenge the unnamed narrator of this wry novel ever expected to face. But when the characters he creates make his “head spin with boredom,” the narrator seeks literary inspiration in Madeleine Tricot, an old woman he meets on a walk. His interest grows when he learns that this octogenarian grandmother and former dressmaker for Karl Lagerfeld suffered a traumatic first love. Before he can learn more, Madeleine’s daughter, Valérie Martin, draws him away from her mother, whom she claims is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and into her own family, the members of whom remind the narrator of “passengers on the same ship who [brush] past each other without ever really meeting.” At first, they strike him as “hackneyed” figures playing tired roles: Valérie, the woman “slightly sad[dened]” by the trials of middle age; her husband, Patrick, the man “stressed out by his job”; Jérémie, the awkward teenage boy with nothing much to say; and Lola, the daughter with no plan for her life. Yet as his involvement in their lives deepens and his writerly objectivity falls away, the narrator realizes that his chance presence in the narrative of their lives is the catalyst that sets them on individual paths toward personal transformation that no one could have foreseen. As it explores the relationship between reality and art, this understated novel about identity, family, and redemption reveals how the most banal incidents can sometimes trigger the most meaningful experiences.

A playful yet profound reflection on the extraordinary nature of ordinary life.