The Merry Month of May

It is difficult to believe this book was written by James Jones, the author of "From Here to Eternity" who was regarded as one of the most promising literary hopes of his generation.It is so bad that I imagined it was a first draft that had been published posthumously but, in fact, it appeared about six or seven years before Jones died in 1977.It is set in Paris during the student rising in 1968 which Jones presents through the eyes of a couple of American expatriates who are said to have been a kind of self profile.The characters are an unlikely and unlikeable bunch who live in sumptuous apartments and spend their time wining, dining, smoking and talking about sex like smutty schoolboys.The main character is a middle-aged screenwriter who feels emasculated when his son accuses him of being a bourgeois reactionary and joins the students.To try and win back his son's respect, he tries to become involved in the rising and even has an affair with a 19-year-old bisexual black American girl.Not content with presenting this feeble stuff, Jones insults the reader's intelligence by throwing in anything that comes into his mind, such as a description of the famous Brasserie Lipp and how he loves to shave with a cut throat razor, amongst other trivia.If you are interested in Jones's life, his daughter, Kaylie, wrote a novel called "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" based on their life in Paris in the 1960s. It was made into a film starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey in 1998. There is also a long interview with him in the Paris Review in the 1970s. Amazon does not allow us to put up links but you can easily Google it.