This novel about ridiculously rich people offers no simple lessons

Frances Price is a ridiculously rich widow, so bored with life on Manhattan’s elite East Side that she creates her own financial crash by spending everything she has. When her financial adviser finally tells her that her worldly goods and homes are being repossessed, she seems relieved to withdraw all the cash she has left, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s a massive amount to most readers, but it’s small change to Frances, the unforgettable antiheroine of French Exit.

The novel’s action begins when Frances takes off to Paris for a last hurrah with her son, Malcolm, a man-child whose only purpose in life is to follow his domineering mother around. He is as clueless as his mother when it comes to money and the role it plays in the average person’s life. Together, they begin their new austere lifestyle by taking a luxury cruise ship to Paris, where a wealthy friend from New York loans them her chic apartment. This is their version of slumming it.

The genius of Patrick deWitt’s storytelling is that these unsympathetic one-percenters, self-centered haves in a world of have-nots, soon become more real, and their fates become interesting. Money has not bought them love, friends, or community. Will they find it now, without their money? And yet, can people like the Prices ever really end up penniless? They have spent their lives running marathons in wealthy circles. (The mere fact that they think they will save money by living in Paris says it all.)