Jacqueline in Paris
In the fall of 1949, 20-year-old socialite Jacqueline Bouvier sets sail for France with a group of Smith College students to study abroad for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris. Though her family sees it as an indulged fancy before her entrance into the marriage market, Jacqueline sees it as an opportunity to help her keep a teenaged promise “never to be a housewife.” In Paris, she can learn French and indulge her love of art, but also meet people and ideas far from the debutante balls and Newport summers of her well-heeled East Coast upbringing. In crowded student cafés, smoky jazz clubs, and faded drawing rooms of the war-scarred city, Jacqueline rubs elbows with American expats, impoverished aristocrats, political idealists, and government agents. Ann Mah’s captivating novel spans that year, a year influential in the shaping of a woman who would become First Lady.
Jacqueline in Paris is less a portrait of an American icon and more a portrait of a postwar Europe struggling to rise phoenixlike from the ashes of war. Mah effectively uses the privileged Jacqueline as a foil to postwar Paris and its residents, contrasting their stories of wartime deprivation, betrayal, and brutality to her comfortable view of the war from across the Atlantic. In her naivety, she’s unwittingly caught up in the political ideology swirling around Paris at a time when the country was trying to rebuild its government and the government was trying to rebuild the people’s trust. However, Jacqueline is a deliberate narrator. As her opinions, her privilege, and her American insularity are challenged, the reader sees glimpses of the woman she will become as the wife of a senator and a president.
