La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life by Elaine Sciolino (review)

SCIOLINO, ELAINE. La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life. New York: Henry Holt Times, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8050-9115-1. Pp. 338. $27. A former New York Times Paris bureau chief who lives in France, Sciolino sees la séduction as key to life in France. She defines it variously as a game, persuasion , charm, concealment, soft power, ritual, code, discretion, deuxième degré, indirection, subtlety, etc.—“the art of creating and relishing pleasure of all kinds” (5). She often likens it to foreplay, emphasizing the primacy of process over result , but stresses that the word in French goes well beyond its sexual connotation in English. Moreover, she contrasts French “seduction” with American social interaction , which she sees as direct, frank, less nuanced, and often blunt. Overall, her “seduction” refers to a way of doing things, something like persuasion rooted in proper forms, social prowess based on a mastery of formal behaviors . She proceeds to lay out how it informs diverse sectors of French life as observed by her personally and professionally, developed in numerous interviews , and laid out in several opinion polls: the male/female relations at the heart of things, but also language and conversation, dress and makeup, cuisine, business, advertising, diplomacy, etc. Her most original remarks come on femininity and the workplace (ch. 6) and on “anti-seduction,” e.g., Sarkozy’s presidential style, or Villepin’s arrogance and inflexibility on the war in Iraq (chs. 13 and 14). The Strauss-Kahn affair broke too late to be included, but she does evoke his reputation as a womanizer and the tendency in political circles and the press to forgive or simply overlook it. There is much here that anyone familiar with France will recognize, and she does in fact make sense of frequent French behavior that can puzzle the American who is new to it. That said, the word itself is used too broadly to keep its currency and can become somewhat tiresome. It also plays into the stereotype of always-amorous French behavior, even if she insists on its broader applicability . More crucially and despite her assertions, her evidence is in fact based on a narrow stratum of French society. She draws the vast majority of her prominent and celebrity informants from the upper social spheres in Paris and resolutely cites their titles and positions in what becomes something of a name-dropping exercise. Even the neighborhood shopkeepers she introduces are in the seventh arrondissement. Characteristically, her epilogue offers as culmination the very formal dinner party she had organized to do research into French-style “seduction.” The fact that she is consciously trying to “seduce” a dozen French people into talking about seduction does not obviate the social limits of the undertaking. She also too often takes at face value what her informants tell her about how they and others proceed with “seduction,” although her own comparisons with life in the United States tend to be more interesting and accurate than those of her French interlocutors, even if they share in the same penchant for premature generalization . She might have done better to identify seduction as the behavior to which many in France in fact aspire, rather than assume it occurs because some people, with whom she is impressed, tell her it does. In a word, hers is the approach of an Adam Gopnik, and her France the one described by Raymonde Carroll or Polly Platt: good as far as it goes, but pretending to broader applicability than it in fact establishes. A fun read full of anecdotes and insights, probably a useful vademecum for certain social circles and perhaps sundry moments in everyday life, but not really more than that. Middlebury College (VT), emeritus Edward C. Knox 972 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 ...