‘Paris by the Book’ could be author’s breakthrough
Local bookstore gets shout-out in pages of novel exploring capital
Local writer Liam Callanan’s new novel has two ingredients that make booksellers and readers swoon: Paris and bookstores.
So it’s no wonder that his publisher, Dutton, is working hard for “Paris by the Book,” tucking French candy with reviewer copies and sending Callanan on tour around the country.
“They put some money in it,” Daniel Goldin, owner of Milwaukee’s Boswell Books, said of the support Callanan is getting from his publisher.
The novel, which comes out here April 3, has already been sold to publishers in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and China. Callanan will mark publication day with an event at Boswell Books, which gets a sly shout-out in his book. Alliance Française de Milwaukee is not only co-sponsoring Callanan’s local event but also contacting sister Alliances Française in other cities on his behalf.
Trade publication Publishers Weekly gave it a coveted starred review, calling the novel “sublime” and promising that “book lovers and Paris aficionados will be enthralled.”
These are the kinds of ingredients that can add up
to a hit. While books with Wisconsin settings have been recent national successes — including Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding” and David Wroblewski’s “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” — it’s a rarer feat for a novel with a strong Milwaukee element, Goldin said. “The Drifter” (2015) by Whitefish Bay novelist Nick Petrie, set in Milwaukee, won the International Thriller Writers best first novel award.
In “Paris by the Book,” a Milwaukee mother and her teenage daughters take over a bookstore in Paris while searching for their missing father. Both playful and serious, the novel has several seeds germinating from Callanan’s life: a red balloon, a little girl’s feeling of déjà vu and a Parisian merchant’s whimsical (or desperate) question.
Callanan just had to find the voice that tied those things together.
A ‘Red Balloon’ person
Callanan, who lives in
Milwaukee, is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an active member of the local literary community. His earlier books include the novel “The Cloud Atlas,” innocently published the same year as the more famous David Mitchell novel “Cloud Atlas,” bringing Callanan confusion, consternation and a surprising number of accidental sales.
As a boy, Callanan was enchanted by Albert Lamorisse’s “The Red Balloon,” a short movie turned book about a boy’s adventures with a persistent balloon that follows him around. Looking at the book his godmother gave him, Callanan noticed he could see addresses on the buildings in the gritty Paris neighborhood where Lamorisse filmed. He thought, I could actually go stand in front of that building and see that part of Paris. That’s seed No. 1.
Years later, Callanan and his wife Susan began traveling to Paris with their three daughters. Their girls already loved the city through “The Red Balloon” and Ludwig Bemelmans’ cheerful “Madeline” books.
Liam remembers standing on a Paris sidewalk with his youngest, then 5, who announced, “I think I’ve been here before.”
“And of course she had,” Callanan said. “She’d been there in the pages of books.”
That’s seed No. 2.
Callanan’s daughters all take French now and can navigate the City of Light pretty well, he said with pride. “They’re very good Wisconsin girls so they know how to order milk in Paris and to order it cold, because if you just order milk, after the raised eyebrow you’ll be offered milk hot,” he said.
On the last day of their first family trip to Paris, the Callanans wandered into The Red Wheelbarrow, an English-language bookshop in the Marais district that was closing. The owner, as a joke, offered the store to the family.
Seed No. 3.
Callanan started writing a novel with all his Paris stuff in it: his fascination with Lamorisse, who not only made “The Red Balloon” but also invented the board game Risk and died in a helicopter crash while filming a movie for the Shah of Iran; his passion for walking the city streets (rather than taking the Metro); his appreciation, not without anxiety, for the great tradition of American expatriate writers in Paris; and the notion of exploring Paris with children, which he highly recommends.
The book unlocked for Callanan when he put it in the voice of Leah, a Milwaukee mother who takes her teenage daughters to Paris looking for Robert, her husband and their father, a novelist who may have run away from the family or may have met a more dire fate. When staying in Paris becomes both attractive and important, Leah, Ellie and Daphne take over an English-language bookstore, which they dub The Late Edition, specializing in dead writers. (If you’re keeping score at home, it’s in the lower Marais, in the 4th arrondissement.)
They also explore the city that fellow Francophile Alan Furst calls “the heartbeat of our civilization.” Leah visits Ménilmontant, the “Red Balloon” neighborhood, seeing the buildings that little Liam wanted to see. Her daughters walk in the footsteps of Madeline (and like Madeline, somebody falls into the Seine).
His novel poses a classic two-kinds-of-people question: Are you a “Madeline” person or a “Red Balloon” person? Or, as Robert puts it, “Paintings, or photographs. Paris in color, or black and white.”
One hundred thousand words later, Callanan is still working on this question.