Young American in Paris tale is lightweight but amusing

"Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down" is young New Yorker Rosecrans Baldwin's short and often clichéd tale of moving to Paris with his wife only to find it is a lot different from New York.

'Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down'

by Rosecrans Baldwin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $26


In his new book, "Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down," Rosecrans Baldwin, a young New Yorker, recounts moving to Paris with his wife to take a job with a French advertising firm.

A thorough Francophile from a young age, Baldwin is ecstatic when he arrives, thrilled to be living in the City of Light, surrounded by the stunning architecture, food and people. But reality soon sets in as it dawns on him that — quelle horreur — the city is actually French, and not only the language but the culture is different from, say, New York.

You can, of course, imagine the shock.

Baldwin struggles with mastering French in a business setting (it gave him migraines). As he recounts, "First day on the job, my French was not super. I'd sort of misled them about that."

He struggles learning to master the informal kiss that is the typical greeting, even in business settings, and dealing with infamous French bureaucracy. He describes it all as if it were a daunting challenge rather than a rather tame exercise in cultural differences. This is, apparently, a sheltered young man. Think Paris is different from New York?

The book is an entertaining but lightweight addition to a genre that is already crushed by the number of Americans "living abroad" books (further subdivided into the French and Italian versions). It's more than a little cliché to describe how terribly difficult it is to move to a foreign country where they don't speak English all the time. But honestly, this borders on downright silly as virtually everyone in Paris speaks English at some level and most visitors hear almost more English than French on the street. There are McDonald's everywhere. The difficulty isn't finding someone who speaks English; it's trying to escape the expanding American cultural dominance abroad.

Almost worse, Baldwin spends chapters on how the French dress, their notoriously sexy ads, and difficulties involved in renting an apartment. Yes, all of that is different from what one might find in New York or Chicago. That's the point of living abroad, isn't it?

Ultimately, Baldwin moves past the cliché, but just barely. The book is worth reading only because it's thankfully short and doesn't require a lot of serious attention.

As a friend once said of her sister: "She talks a lot but says so little, it gives you time to rest." Still, it's a worthy read, if only to get a glimpse of what it's like to live on a budget as an overwrought young ad executive in Paris at 29.

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