THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY BY JAMES JONES AKASHIC, 290 PAGES, ...
IN 1968, James Jones, author of the acclaimed World War II trilogy that includes From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, was living in Paris, where student revolts and massive strikes had paralyzed all commerce and transportation. Though received with mixed reviews in 1970 and out of print for 15 years before this reissue by Akashic, James Jones' The Merry Month of May deserves a place among the great chronicles of the global upheaval of the 60s.
The novel has an unlikely narrator in Jack Hartley, "a failed writer at a variety of forms." The divorced, 47-year-old publisher of a review that's a rival to George Plimpton's Paris Review, this very ordinary man hooks up with a group of American expatriates that includes his closest friends-the slowly dissolving Gallagher family. Harry Gallagher is a successful screenwriter who has lost interest in his wife and instead pursues his sexual fantasy of sleeping with a pair of lesbians. Harry's son, Hill, is a film student and radical who wants nothing to do with his bourgeois parents. Both father and son fall for the same temptress, an African American free spirit named Samantha Everton, who claims to be in love with Harry's uptight wife, Louisa.
Jones adeptly shifts back and forth from the Gallagher family to revolution in the streets. The reader observes the students' rebellion from Jack and Harry's cynical point of view. Harry, an ex-radical who moved to France to escape the House of Un-American Activities Committee, is jealous and resentful of the students and his defiant son Hill, though he agrees to help them shoot a film of the revolt. Jack is a voyeur of the action, touring the occupied Sorbonne and the Odéon and wandering around the barricades. But he also finds himself insulted by the students' "absolute righteousness," in particular that of Hill's girlfriend/comrade whom he describes as having "a built-in inability?even to conceive?that she might ever, once, one time, be even four percent wrong. She looked at me the way some Communists did? She had awarded herself total moral superiority."
The novel contains some humor, such as the scene where director Luis Buñuel is offended by Harry's home cocktail bar-which is crafted from a church pulpit-and attacks him with his own sword. One of the book's most charming facets is the elaborate description of Paris, from the paving stones that students used as weapons and that were meticulously replaced by Italian specialists, to the complicated waiter hierarchy at Jack's favorite restaurant.
The Merry Month of May expertly captures Paris in 1968: the buildup, the politics, the street life, the excitement, the disappointment and the downfall.