French Exit (DeWitt) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The comic brilliance that sparked deWitt’s earlier adventures ignites this "tragedy of manners" and Frances Price, "a moneyed, striking woman of sixty-five years," is revealed to be another of deWitt’s sublime eccentrics.… Rarely has a transatlantic voyage and its limited diversions been so pithily evoked.
Anna Mundow - Washington Post

   
A modern story, a satire about an insouciant widow on a quest for refined self-immolation.… DeWitt’s surrealism is cheerful and matter-of-fact, making the novel feel as buoyantly insane as its characters.… DeWitt is a stealth absurdist, with a flair for dressing up rhyme as reason.
Katy Waldman - The New Yorker

   
A sparkling dark comedy that channels both Noel Coward’s wit and Wes Anderson’s loopy sensibility. DeWitt’s tone is breezy, droll, and blithely transgressive.… These are people you may not want to invite to dinner, but they sure make for fun reading.
Heller McAlpin - NPR


Hilarious.… Delightful.… In his book, as in [Edith] Wharton’s, New Yorkers’ wit and elaborate manners cannot hide the searing depth of their pain.… DeWitt is aiming for farce and to say something about characters who cannot get out of their own way, and he achieves both with elan.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


[A] riotous tragedy of (ill) manners.… The show stealer here is deWitt’s knack for scene setting and dialogue in the form of Frances’ wry one-liners.… That Frances sure is a force to contend with. But what a classy broad.
San Francisco Chronicle

   
Darkly comic.… French Exit is both a satiric send-up of high society and a wilding mother-son caper.
Poets & Writers


[DeWitt] creates and conveys entire worlds—and not just names and places, but colors, smells, sounds and style.… Incredibly entertaining and oddly sympathetic.… And snappy stage-worthy dialogue—deWitt’s wheelhouse.
Eugene Register-Guard


[E]ntertaining.… DeWitt’s novel is full of vibrant characters taking good-natured jabs at cultural tropes; readers will be delighted.
Publishers Weekly


Whatever you do, don’t mess with Frances Price.… An entertaining portrait of people who are obsessed with the looming specter of death and who don’t quite feel part of the time they were born into.
BookPage


"They're not normal people": an entertaining romp among the disaffected bourgeoisie..… [S]harply observed moments give deWitt's well-written novel more depth than the usual comedy of manners.… [A] bright, original yarn with a surprising twist.
Kirkus Reviews