French blockbuster arrives in English
The first hot novel of 2018 is Leila Slimani’s international blockbuster, The Perfect Nanny, which has just been translated into English.
But be forewarned: Those readers sure to be most curious about it are the very readers who would do best to avoid it. The last thing working mothers with young children need to be reading in their nanosecond of downtime is this psychological suspense novel about a “perfect” nanny who snaps.
The book aspires to the taut elegance of that classic nanny nightmare tale, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and in language and complexity it comes pretty darn close. Indeed, Slimani’s novel won France’s most prestigious literary honour, the Goncourt Prize, when it was published there in 2016. Slimani is the first Moroccan-born woman to be so honoured.
The voice of Slimani’s omniscient third-person narrator is consistently chill and precise. And her plot spares neither her characters’ fates nor her readers’ sensibilities. The opening sentences of The Perfect Nanny warn us that this is a story of the worst that can happen and, in fact, it just has:
“The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds. The doctor said he didn’t suffer. The broken body, surrounded by toys, was put inside a grey bag, which they zipped shut. The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived.… On the way to the hospital, she was agitated, her body shaken by convulsions.… Her lungs had been punctured, her head smashed violently against the blue chest of drawers.”
The two children have been murdered by their longtime nanny. Their mother discovers this grotesque scene upon her return to the family’s small apartment in Paris.
This discovery occurs within the opening pages of the novel, so the intrigue here derives not from what has happened, but why it happened.
The irony is that for all its fine language, the take-away of The Perfect Nanny is pretty much the same as the feminist backlash message of that 1992 cinematic cultural touchstone, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Namely, there is no “perfect nanny.” Indeed, the nanny who’s tending to your children may well be a psycho. Is any career worth that risk, ladies?
Surely it’s the enduring masochistic power of that nightmare — rendered particularly vivid here through Slimani’s great stylistic gifts — that have made this slim novel an international bestseller. Talk about a guilty pleasure.