MacNicol explored these same questions in her searching, intimate debut, “No One Tells You This,” which chronicled the tumultuous year following her 40th birthday, when her beloved mother heartbreakingly succumbed to Parkinson’s.
In this follow-up, she employs a harder, cooler tone and style, scaffolded with a tinge of defensiveness, as if anticipating the judgment of prudish readers who clutch pearls to their necks as they gape in horror at her flouting of convention. In her 40s, she explains, she has grown accustomed to disdain from “a certain woman.”
What “really irks this woman,” she writes, “is that I appear to be enjoying myself. I have veered off the narrow path laid out for women” and, worse, “it turns out I’m fine.” Or, as her Paris friend Nina puts it, “We’re an attack on the value system of certain people.”
Perhaps. But MacNicol’s prickly stance keeps the reader at arm’s length, at times leading to fatigue with her endless descriptions of meals — so much rosé and chocolat chaud — and bike rides around the city.
MacNicol is undoubtedly an incisive cultural critic, with a clear and singular take on our social-media-dominated era, and it’s a pleasure to accompany her on her considerations of thorny social issues. But in “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself,” her distrust of — and disdain for — the reader often threatens to undermine her sharp observations and analyses, not to mention narrative momentum.
Still, the force of MacNicol’s elegant prose presides, alongside her uncompromising intellect. The novelistic approach to scene and character that animated her first book is largely a delight, the literary equivalent of a long catch-up with a brilliant friend. And if that’s not fun, I don’t know what is.
I’M MOSTLY HERE TO ENJOY MYSELF: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris | By Glynnis MacNicol | Penguin Life | 278 pp. | $30
