Michael Dirda on 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog'

Much of the first part of Barbery's novel simply depicts daily life in the apartment building, as filtered through the sensibility of either Madame Michel or Paloma. The 12-year-old belongs to a long line of sophisticated French whiz kids, and she's able to toss off bon mots with Left Bank aplomb:

"He's so conservative that he won't say hello to divorced people." "As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering." "A teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. . . . It's a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood."

But halfway through The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the lives of Paloma and Madame Michel are unexpectedly transformed. A Japanese gentleman named Kakuro Ozu buys a vacant apartment. Though clearly rich, he is also immensely courteous and shrewd, and immediately perceives that neither the little girl nor the concierge is just what she seems. Before long, Monsieur Ozu is gently contriving some little tests to discover more about their secret lives. And this leads to developments that range from the comic to the touching to the heartbreaking.

Madame Michel, in particular, begins to grow confused. Perhaps she does want more from life than books and music and videos. "Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost."

Eventually, though, the wavering concierge realizes that she must risk the awful daring of a moment's surrender. Paloma has already prepared us for this leap, when she writes in one of her journal entries about " kairos, a Greek concept that means roughly 'the right moment,' something at which Napoleon apparently excelled. . . . Anyway, kairos is the intuition of the moment, something like that."

Nearly everyone in The Elegance of the Hedgehog takes great care over what the sociologist Erving Goffman once called "the presentation of self in everyday life." And this makes for much of the book's humor. At one point Madame Josse takes Paloma to consult an icily chic Parisian therapist about her little girl's "secretiveness." Eventually, left alone with the doctor, Paloma squares off with him: "Listen carefully, Mr. Permafrost Psychologist, you and I are going to strike a little bargain. You're going to leave me alone and in exchange I won't wreck your little trade in human suffering by spreading nasty rumors about you among the Parisian political and business elite. And believe me -- at least if you say you can tell just how intelligent I am -- I am fully capable of doing this." To Paloma's surprise, her threat actually works.

At one point Madame Michel asks herself, "What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others?" What indeed? Certainly, the intelligent Muriel Barbery has served readers well by giving us the gently satirical, exceptionally winning and inevitably bittersweet Elegance of the Hedgehog. ·

Michael Dirda's email address is mdirda@gmail.com.