Well written, intelligent novel that is a mix of coming of age and cross cultural romance during a post War Paris. Well done!

David Wright Falade’s “The New Internationals,” which installs its idealistic leftist-minded young principals in post-World War II France when tensions were still running high over its colonialist past in West Africa, will likely prove something of a challenge for not-so-internationally-minded American readers. Not so foreign for me, though, the novel’s concerns, with how I grew up in a military family whose tours included three years in France at a time not too distant from that of the novel’s action.
When, for instance, Cecile, a young white Jew whose grandmother was taken during the Occupation, shows Paris to her newfound friend and lover-to-be Mack, a black American GI with musical inclinations, their walk through the city, including the Champs-Élysées and an area where, Cecil notes, German generals kept their mistresses during the Occupation, had me recalling how my brother and I took a quick stroll along the Champs-Élysées just before our flight back to the States from Orly. And when Mack is confronted by his black commanding officer for having diverted items from the commissary for black-market trading, the military milieu of the transgression was quite familiar to me, with my having frequented commissaries and PXs and the like throughout my childhood. And the novel’s French-Algerian tensions reminded me of the day when the American school I attended was dismissed early for fear of violence.
So as I say, not so foreign for me, the novel’s concerns, though even with my more cosmopolitan background there was still some confusion, as there always is for me in novels having to do with the Occupation, in no small part because of the acronyms for the various factions. Also, the buildup to the novel’s explosive climax, which draws together the principals in a melee of violence, proved a bit tedious for me.
Still, an interesting and compelling look at the postwar period in France, Falade’s book, and especially timely now, with France having just made a gesture of remembrance for African troops shot dead on French army orders in Senegal during World War II.