Rat /

In Fernanda Eberstadt's novel, a girl from rural France tracks down her father in London. IT'S a long way from Park Avenue: the beautiful, desolate, casually despoiled landscape of the Pyrénées-Orientales in southernmost France, where Fernanda Eberstadt moved with her husband and children in 1998 and where she has set her latest novel. Eberstadt grew up in a fancifully ornate Upper East Side apartment with pistachio-green velvet walls, ancient statuary and a gold Marilyn by Andy Warhol in the living room, as she reminisced in The New York Observer in 2007. It was a childhood studded with glamour: in 1962 (little Fernanda was just 2 at the time) her parents - the photographer and psychotherapist Fredrick Eberstadt and the novelist Isabel Eberstadt - gave a legendary costume party at which Jacqueline Kennedy, flanked by Secret Service escorts, danced to a reggae band till dawn. But throughout that gilded childhood, Eberstadt longed for another existence, for the footloose life of the willfully dispossessed. In her novels, idealists and fasttrackers wrestled with thorny problems of love and social identity. After her family's move to the French countryside, her lifelong fascination with Gypsies inspired a nonfiction book about their haunted music and lives. "Flamenco," she wrote, "is the art of desperate measures, the winning of a fugitive grace from failure, bankruptcy, shame." That fugitive grace, that rag-picking of hope from ruin, resurfaces in Eberstadt's shrewd and sensuous fifth novel, "Rat." The story follows a 15-year-old from the Pyrénées Orientales, a child as fierce and unpredictable as the howling Tramontane wind that whips her ramshackle town near the Spanish border. Rat lives with her single mother, Vanessa, a brocanteuse who trawls dumps and flea markets for a living and envelops Rat (as she nicknames her daughter, whose real name is Celia) in a rough and teasing love. Rat's father, the English artist Gillem McKane, who once had an on-the-fly encounter with Vanessa, has never met his daughter. Still, Rat fantasizes about her absent father, as abandoned children will; she dreams of snuggling with him and her grandmother, the once racy ex-Vogue model for whom Celia was named, on a pink velvet sofa in his London town house. A dream of belonging in a safe and elegant world. In real life, Rat runs around happily barefoot and plays with the rambunctious Gypsy kids at the local market. She and her friend Jerome, like Cathy and Heathcliff, clamber up to their "fort" on the cliffs and peer down at the bejeweled revelers at a local beachside restaurant. "Later on, when she meets people who've been born rich, they will seem like dogs without a sense of smell," Eberstadt writes. "Bank accounts belong to the realm of the unreal. What's real is your quick wits." Any reader of Eberstadt's earlier fiction can see that a clash of cultures is inevitable, as this free spirit feels the gravitational pull of wealth and respectability. Where Rat comes from, kids grow up scorning and, of course, envying the children of the rich, "slathered in sun tan lotion and made to wear hats so their skin won't burn. ... As soon as the sun goes down, their mothers ease them into hooded sweaters, knitted cardigans." As Rat becomes a teenager, she grows tall and angular, "all elbows and moods," joining the ranks of Eberstadt's other outsize women and men (tiny terrors like Vanessa are in short supply). At school she fights off bullies and champions Morgan, a friend's damaged orphan son (he "liked his revenge the way other boys liked candy bars or video games") whom Vanessa has taken into their home. When Vanessa's abusive boyfriend, Thierry, hits a bestial new low, Rat takes 9-year-old Morgan and sets out, broke and barefoot as always, for London and the promise of a new life. It's a picaresque journey, fraught with peril - not from teenage squatters at a spooky old dynamite factory on the coast, but from immigration officials and other hobgoblins of the civilized world. Rat navigates the channel crossing, and the harder passage from aspiration to actuality, with the nervy insolence that is her birthright. Meanwhile, her artist father, living in West London with his bosomy wife and their coddled son, has his own psychic disconnect to cope with. His life has been a frantic bid for domestic stability. "If you have stools in a kitchen around a countertop, then your children will perch on them, chattering to you while you cook, and then you will be a happy family." If you miss the school play, or fail to tack emergency medical numbers and your little boy's drawings to the refrigerator, then "it's helter-skelter. The floods will engulf you, and everybody will resort to savagery." The arrival of two French waifs on Gillem's doorstep was never part of his life's plan. EBERSTADT is at her stylistic best when ranging through a "semiclan-destinely inhabited" landscape of artichoke fields with sere gray leaves and "purplish bruise-colored" fruit, of electric skies over ratty storefront churches and glittering seas. London, by comparison, is a city of limitations, of constricting marriages and circumscribed dreams, where Rat, prowling the banks of the Thames, finds herself thinking "that if she and Morgan hitched a ride on a barge, eventually they might find themselves back among the marshes and flamingo-haunted lagoons of the Pyrénées-Orientales, with snow-streaked Mount Canigou looming in the distance instead of office towers." If Eberstadt's narrative loses some of its white heat and windswept clarity as she tries to squeeze in urban anxieties about everything from private school to terrorism (even her account of an attack on the London subway system seems curiously muted), that is not so surprising. Novels, like children, need room to breathe. 'Later on, when she meets people who've been born rich, they will seem like dogs without a sense of smell.' Cathleen Medwick's latest book is "Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul."

Growing up with her loving single-parent mom in a rough neighborhood in the South of France, Celia names herself Rat, and when Mom adopts Algerian orphan Morgan, 15-year-old Rat acts as his fierce older sister, protecting him first against racism in the community ( It stinks being Arab in France ) and then against sexual abuse at home, when Mom refuses to believe her sleazy boyfriend is abusing Morgan. Always haunted by the mystery of the father she has never met, Rat runs away with Morgan to London to find her dad--and herself. Eberstadt's contemporary take on the elemental identity quest is rich, wry, and heartbreaking, complete with e-mails, security cameras, cell phones, and globish talk. Whether it is the immediate drama of Rat's loss of innocence ( her blithe assumption that other people were basically well-intentioned ) or her sometimes painful independence from the mother she loves ( from worship to apartness to wary but still infintely tender ), the plainspoken, direct prose and the beautiful storytelling combine to produce a novel that is mythic, gritty, and unforgettable.--Rochman, Hazel Copyright 2010 Booklist

Eberstadt (Little Money Street) creates a powerful modern legend in which a drug dealer can be a fairy godmother and the handsome prince may turn out to be your father. Fifteen-year-old Celia Bonnet, aka Rat, lives with her mother, Vanessa, in the Pyrenees, where they survive on what they can scavenge and sell at local markets. Rat dreams of some day meeting her long-gone biological father, who got Vanessa pregnant during a one-night stand. Rat and Vanessa's tiny family grows first with Morgan, the orphaned son of Vanessa's best friend, and then with Vanessa's boyfriend, Thierry. But after Thierry sexually assaults Morgan, Rat and Morgan run away, dreaming of crossing the Channel to find Rat's biological father, Gillem. Eberstadt invokes the heroines of Charlotte Bronte and Cynthia Voigt to create Rat, who moves forward out of grim determination to protect Morgan, and though Vanessa could be less opaque, Eberstadt creates a sympathetic figure in Gillem, whose artistic crisis takes a backseat to the demands of new fatherhood. Amid the thorns and crumb trails is a portrait of a childhood lived freely, the dangers weighed against its potential for adventure. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The travels of two intrepid youngsters become an unlikely journey to maturity in this engaging fifth novel from the London-based American author (The Furies, 2003 etc.). In its primary narrative, we're introduced to 15-year-old Celia Bonnet, affectionately dubbed "Rat" by her beautiful, wayward mother Vanessa, with whom she lives in the French Pyrnnes near the Spanish border, where Vanessa makes a living as a brocanteur working the open markets ("She buys and sells old goods"). Bonding with a friend her age (Jrme) and a younger orphan (Morgan) adopted by the impulsive Vanessa, Rat lives an essentially outdoor, unstructured life, pumping her mom for information about the stranger who fathered herLondon artist Gillem McKane, the son of famous fashion model Celia Kidd. When Vanessa's live-in lover Thierry proves himself alarmingly unworthy of her (or anyone's) affections, Rat and Morgan strike out for London. When this strongly imagined novel sticks closely to Rat's brash, stoical viewpoint, it's riveting. But when, halfway through the narrative, her experiences and perceptions are juxtaposed with those of the reintroduced Gillem, the story briefly loses conviction. Gillem's morose fatalism, which inspires his envisioning of the Iraq War in an ambitious modern Bayeux Tapestry, is never fully credible. Parallels and contrasts to Rat's busy imagination are nicely handled, but it's only when Rat and he force themselves to connect, tell their separate truths and risk both the creation and the loss of intimacy, that the book comes fully alive. When Rat realizes that Vanessa needs her more than she herself needs a father, the pieces fall beautifully, movingly into place. A mature, intelligent and unusually perceptive study of the paradoxes of belonging to others, and being oneselfEberstadt's best novel yet. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.