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>> Taking It to Heart is a Parisian Bridget Jones

by JULIET WATERS

I can't really take credit for the observation that all of Marie Desplechin's characters in Taking It to Heart speak from the same void. I have terrible handwriting, and what I really meant when I jotted down that note was that they speak from the same voice. But while I was trying to figure out what the hell I'd been thinking, I realized that there was a certain accuracy to my mistake.

Desplechin's women speak from an existential heartache that leads them to make very grand, very French statements about love like: "Given the choice between love and having people around, a thousand times people and never again love." Or: "You only escape from loneliness in fits and starts. And friendship is responsible for many fits and starts. I love friendship. It's like the gulp of air torturers allow their victims before they push their heads back underwater." Or: "I had stuck up photos of this merry band [of old friends] on the walls of my flat: smiling girls, dreamy boys. That way I could see with my own eyes that the awful feeling of loneliness which sometimes brought me to my knees was the result of a calcium deficiency rather than a warning given free of charge by a heart suffocating from loneliness."

These are all statements made by different women in different stories. Characters who sound and act a little like what would happen to Bridget Jones if she'd been raised on Emma Bovary instead of Emma Woodhouse. You know that at some point in their lives all these women have sat down alone with a bottle of wine and a Nina Simone CD.

Take Christiane, the girl who attributes loneliness to a calcium deficiency. A publicist who has settled into a life of unrequited crushes and an obsession with haikus, Christiane gets into a fight at a party with Anna Lise a narcissistic, racist friend who has stolen her man and her new hobby. In an attempt to embarrass her, Anna Lise announces, "Christiane is now going to recite us a genuine French haiku. Go on, Christiane, off you go. Share a little of your vast knowledge with us, if you don't mind." To which Christiane, who throughout the story has actually been composing some quite lovely haikus, replies in precisely scanned syllables: "You stupid bastards/You can go to fucking hell/I'm going home now."

It's so French, and so Sex in the City. Desplechin populates her Paris with slutty single mothers, desperate divorcees and lonely, fast-talking career girls who, to paraphrase one character, don't tuck the sheets in too tight. There's one fabulously perverse young writer who decides to study medicine so she can "feel people up" then write stories about it just to spite her puritanical parents.

The stories in Taking It to Heart are quirky, funny, neurotic, well-written and sometimes annoying. They teeter dangerously between an artificial bravado--treating loneliness the way French existential heroes of the '50s did--and an exaggerated self-immolating masochism. But Desplechin's self-conscious satire and charm usually steers her characters back to earth.

These are not so much the same character as the same soul reincarnated into different personalities. A soul that does seem to be evolving, creating the weird feeling that Taking It to Heart is more like a novel than a collection of short stories. As the collection progresses there is more friendship, more men who don't live down to the heroines' cynical expectations and less loneliness and self-absorption. The title story, which is the last in the collection, confronts a grandmother's last days with unexpected poignancy.

While they follow the trend of most best-selling chick lit, there's something stronger about these characters than their anglo counterparts. They take the void for granted and don't expect the day when it will fill up with romance, or children, or whatever. It makes them less optimistic, but a little more interesting.:

Taking It to Heart, by Marie Desplechin. Translated by Will Hobson. Granta, pb, 170pp, $15.99