Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Though neither a crime nor a detective novel, Georges Simenon's Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (1946) nonetheless takes place in the lonely, desperate, claustrophobic, and paranoid world of most of the author's other books--of which there are hundreds. The story of a recently divorced French actor, Francios, who takes up solitary residence in Manhattan until he encounters and becomes dependent upon an unattached woman who is also of foreign birth, Three Rooms In Manhattan is a dark examination of a crippled human psyche. Simenon had few peers when it came to writing psychological fiction, and despite a hopeful if slightly improbable ending, the novel is gripping and seductive. Simenon also excelled at recording the vicissitudes of human emotion under stress, and his earnest depiction of Francios, who is crippled by jealousy, delusion, and rage, is superb.

Early in the novel, Simenon shrewdly depicts Kay, the object of Francios's obsession, as a listless, calculating mythomaniac, so much so that during the book's first 50 pages, Kay seems like one of the permanently wounded, misplaced female protagonists found in Jean Rhys' five novels. But readers are seeing Kay through Francios's blighted eyes, and Kay eventually manifests on the page in quite a different fashion. Nonetheless, Three Rooms In Manhattan revels in the grim, the sordid, and the violent, and an ugly fog of sadomasochism continually hangs in the air. Few 20th Century writers, with the exception of Denis De Rougemont, Jean Genet, and Vita Sackville-West, in her diaries, have had the courage to depict the cruelty and desire for domination and submission that lies just beneath the surface of passionate love.

Appropriately, the book takes place in mid-autumn, when the New York City weather routinely shifts between the transcendent and the unpleasant. The novel's first half revolves around a sometimes nightmarish schedule of endless, compulsive, and directionless walks which the couple takes through the city. Stopping only to drink and smoke in bars, and occasionally to eat, Francios and Kay are two lost souls seeking solace in one another, and both incapable of being apart and unable to be alone, except for the briefest of intervals. All the while, unspoken suspicions, recriminations, and phantoms from the past hang in the air.

Modern readers may find Francios misogynist in the extreme, as he spends a great amount of psychic energy spewing volleys of hatred towards Kay in his imagination, even while he walks calmly beside her through the haunted city streets. The idea of taking active revenge against all of the women who have wounded him--especially against his ex-wife, who has left him for a much younger man--through Kay is never far from his consciousness. But Simenon superbly reveals how it is the ostensibly subservient and masochistic Kay, and not Francios, who is the stronger of the two. Accepting even physical abuse, Kay manages to remain perceptive, objective, and resilient, while her lover repeatedly collapses in bouts of tears, humiliation, and self hatred. For Francios, passion and deep anxiety are synonymous; unable to live independently, he discovers that love is a stifling, suffocating trap too.

The mood of fatalism that suffuses Three Rooms In Manhattan was somewhat prescient; Simenon, upon whom Francios was based, eventually married Denyse Ouimet, the woman who inspired the character of Kay. But Ouimet later "lapsed by degrees into psychosis," and the child of their union, Marie-Jo, committed suicide.

Most of Simenon's non-detective fiction has been long out of print in America; New York Review Books is to be commended for bringing this and several other classic Simenon novels back into circulation.

Let me add that Simenon offers that rare combination in art--artistic skill and fabulous productivity. There's Mozart and Hayden and Bellini and Des Prez and Defoe, as against the tormented labors of Beethoven. There's Dickens and Simenon and Shakespeare and A Trollope and Hugo and Dumas (pere), and DeMeung, as against Conrad and Flaubert and Hemingway, who suffered and suffered. Some people are born lucky. Are there any interviews with Simenon that offer an explanation? By the way, Simenon's closest peer in the golden age of detective fiction is Graham Greene: Both are consumate wordsmiths, both eschew the vegetive world tho setting their fictions in romantic locals, and both write successfully in several modes of fiction.

One of Simenon's roman durs, novels that are bleaker in tone, THREE BEDROOMS IN MANHATTAN, is good, but not as good as two others I have read, Tropic Moon (New York Review Books Classics) and The Engagement (New York Review Books Classics). Simenon again takes the literary style best associated with crime noir, using short, hard sentences, and applies it to a non-criminal story.

In THREE BEDROOMS, the story is that of two lonely people meeting by hapstance and thereby changing everything. Francois is an out of work French actor who has come to New York after his wife humiliatingly left him for a younger man. Kay is a woman with a past who, by her own admission, would have taken about any guy who would have her. As happens all too frequently in real life, when two damaged souls meet, they discover the nicks and cuts in one's personality fit into those of the other like a key into a lock. Francois and Kay meet, and it is as if their previous lives no longer matter.

The writing is at times extraordinary. The rain drenched streets of New York at night are as clear as if the reader were looking at them with the light of the full moon. The story, however, becomes a little too pedestrian after awhile. And Simenon is a little too, well, French at time. Francois loves Kay, then cannot stand the sight of her, then is so madly in love as to be in an abyss, and on and on and on. While the French are good at noir (there is a reason why the concept is stated in the French), they can lay it on a bit thick at times. It is what keeps THREE BEDROOMS IN MANHATTAN from being any better than average.