The Art of Regret

Mary Fleming's The Art of Regret is one of the best books I've read in awhile. I expected to love the setting as I adore Paris. Falling in love with the characters was an unexpected bonus.

I unequivocally loved this book. It was beautifully written . The main character is male and the author is a woman but she brilliantly captures his point of view. It was so moving and believable. She depicts Paris and its arrondissements so clearly and lovingly you know she must be a Parisienne. Trevor, the main character, evolves and matures after a series of horrible events that leave him scarred and hopeless. I felt so invested in his family and his agonies and moved by his eventual realization that the art of regret is not limited to photography but also to life and our ability to forgive others and ourselves. Bravo!

This is one of the most gorgeous and haunting story I have ever read. The Art of Regret really sums up the entire synopsis of this novel.

The book centers around Trevor who is living in Paris after his family goes through major tragedy back in New York. Trevor is now middle-aged and owns his bike shop, but he lives with so much regret and personal blame for the things he thought he was responsible for as a little boy. Because of this, he has trouble with all his relationships, his mother, brother, and any romantic relationships. Let me say this Trevor at his core is a good man who ultimately carries a burden that is almost too much for him to bare. Then another personal tragedy occurs, which leads him to learn the art of forgiveness.

This is literary fiction at its core. This is all about relationships and overcoming the shame one feels. This is some of the most lush writing I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

Thank you She Writes Press for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

'This meant that all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the half-remembered things stayed trapped in my brain. Like birds in an overcrowded cage, they flapped wing against wing with nowhere to go.'

Trevor is an American, the United States his true home and this is the one permanent, solid fact of his childhood. Possibly the only fact he remembers correctly. It is in America that his family structure crumbles after incredible loss and from that moment on changes the meaning of home, both physically and emotionally. Silence serves to disrupt the natural process of grief, and France becomes his family’s destination all because mother had once ‘spent a fun year in Paris’. So much of his youth is buried, things never discussed, questions never posed, everything figured out on his own when he is just a boy which sadly Trevor builds his memory upon. As soon as he is all grown up, he will return to America! That is the driving force of his youth and everyone knows it. And yet…

We find him in his thirties, running a Parisian bicycle shop that he ‘inherited’ from the prior owner. Nothing about the old shop has changed, much like the rest of his life, here too Trevor is ‘just passing through’ and has no plan to alter anything, leaving the shop much as it was when the previous owner Nigel was alive. It isn’t really his, that seems to be the one thought that pervades his life, the feeling that nothing belongs to him- not country, family, lovers nor business. The bike shop is barely surviving until he has a turn of luck when transit workers go on strike, paralyzing the train and subway system fighting for social security reform. Suddenly, his bike sales are kicking up, eviction lo longer looming but it was never his dream. Just another thing that ‘fell into his lap’, not much of a choice. He is the black sheep of his family, and when love presents itself, it’s going to be yet another threat to the shaky relationships he maintains with his brother and mother. Trevor finally feels something worth holding tight to, sordid or not, this attraction is impossible to deny and why should he? He feels electric with it!

His relationship with his brother Edward is one of punishment, rejection and regret. Wildly opposite of each other, both chose to process the tragedy of their childhood in different ways, one that distanced them as siblings and challenged loyalty (at least to Trevor’s mind). But how much of what we believe and build our morality upon is ever factual? How much do we destroy on our ‘self-righteous path’, forcing us to stop seeing our own blood as people with feelings too, doing their best to have a life? The danger in keeping the past locked up tight is how much love we push away, and all the mistaken beliefs that are given life. Trevor has always felt that his mother too is suspect, the careless whims leading them all to Paris, forcing her children into a brand new life in a foreign country, making a ghost of the family they once were, not realizing how much it will haunt Trevor into adulthood. Maybe the very things that drives him from his family began with her or at least his invention of who she is, rather than knowing the truth. It may not just be all ‘appearances’ his mother cares about, like any of us, she too has her reasons.

We often decide on our own facts within the family, and carry that into relationships we build or deny. There in lies the germ, how we invent everyone, rather than seeing them as they are and as we see with Trevor, we do it with ourselves as well. He spends so much time holed up in his own world, not wanting to let anyone in, especially his family.

What happens after the fall may be the making of Trevor, finally. Can family ever mend, from the biggest betrayals? Trevor has a lot to learn, his myopic view of everyone in his life alienates him, of his own accord. Tragedy slips in again and I felt choked up, which doesn’t happen often in fiction for me. I sometimes wanted to punch Trevor as much as his brother does. It all began with his mother and ends with her too, and all I can think about is how much we destroy our families when we stubbornly decide things, based on weak assumptions. How often it is our own lack of effort at fault, we ourselves who cause so much damage to our happiness, and that of others.

For a brief time the reader lives like a true Parisian, and it’s lovely but for me it truly is a novel about the art of regret, the ways we shock ourselves with our choices, behavior. If Trevor is lucky he will make amends before it’s too late. If he could just stop seeing himself as a victim that the whole world, or more his family, is against. I read it with a heavy heart, but the city of Paris was a balm.

Publication date: October 22, 2019

She Writes Press

What makes a person who they are? How do relationships define us? Nature or nurture?
Wonderful read.

I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, Mary Fleming, and She Writes Press. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. I can happily recommend Mary Fleming to friends and family. She is an author who understands family. And the art of regret.

By the time Trevor Macfarquahar was eight years old he had lost his sister, his father, and had moved with the remaining family - mom Helen and younger brother Edward - from New York to Paris. Though Edward flourishes in Paris, Trevor sees it all as yet another loss he cannot bear. His youth and adolescence are bathed in angst and his one desire is to return to the USA, to his country. His mom remarries a Parisian banker, Edmond Harcourt-Laporte and though Edward, who was too young to remember his sister and father, allows himself to be adopted by Edmond, to accept this 'new' family dynamic, Trevor can only see it as yet another heartless loss.

We peek into Trevor's life when he is 37, alone by choice. An attractive man, Trevor has a policy of always maintaining two casual dating relationships so no one would expect too much or take him seriously. Luck does occasionally shine on him though he doesn't recognize it as such - for years he worked for Nigel Jones who owned a bicycle shop called Melo-Velo on rue des Martyrs, repairing and selling new and used bikes, accessories, etc. On Nigel's untimely, unexpected death, Trevor inherits the shop contents and lease on the building and an upstairs room that he adapts and uses for a bare-bones living space. Not exactly his cup of tea, not the life he envisioned for himself and at that point in time bicycles were in low demand, but it was familiar and without pressure, so he settled.

Once a month he joined his lawyer brother Edward, Edward's wife Stephanie and their three children, and the occasional Harcourt-Laporte relative at his mother and stepfather's home for a meal and talks, a family tradition that abruptly drops from his routine when Trevor allows himself to be seduced by his brother Edwards' wife Stephanie. Seduced, and caught.

For five years, he was out of touch with all of his family. But there are more good luck moves he marginally notes. With several train personnel strikes and growing traffic snarls on the motorways of Paris, bicycling becomes fashionable again. The insurance company who owns his shop building gives him official notice - they will not renew his lease on the downstairs store when it expires. He will have to move, or sell the business. Last year that would have been an easy decision, but he was making a fairly good living now and he reluctantly seeks and finds a new building, moving the shop a 15-minute walk away, but maintaining the one-room living area above what was Melo Velo but is now a cell phone store.

Trevor also finds himself with what began as casual friendships but now are essential to his lifestyle. When the homeless guy, Michel, who begs in front of the grocery store across rue de l"Universite from the new bike shop gets picked up for a knifing incident and has to do jail time, Trevor allows himself to become the keeper of Michel's dog, a black labrador very much in need of extensive expensive vet care, a loving and loyal companion that Trevor will have to turn back over to Michel. He names her Cassie and sees her through all sorts of parasite medications, and begins to wonder where he will hide her if/when Michel gets out of jail. In the meantime, she goes everywhere with Trevor and becomes very dear to him.

It began with the dog but didn't stop there. Piotr is an undocumented illegal alien from Poland, a farm boy who begins working at Melo Velo parttime to help Trevor catch up on repairs and save enough to send to Poland for his girlfriend Wanda. The workload picks up, but with Piotr working full-time, Trevor has the option of some time for himself. Time to work on easing the regrets that so blockade his life and heart, especially over the last five years.

Cedric Merie is Trevor's only really close friend, a relationship that began in grade school in Paris. Cedric and his wife Viviane live at Vernon and want more time with Trevor, need to introduce him to their new adopted son and to rejoice with them the soon-to-be birth of their own long-awaited child. Edward, now remarried and with another child, wants to meet. While at Cedric's, Trevor again meets an artist named Bea Fairbank, a friend of one of his ex-lovers. He finds himself falling, but she knows him too well to take him seriously. He will have to show her that he has changed. But has he really? All of these new possibilities require Trevor to alter his responses and attitudes if they are to be successfully rebuilt relationships. Can he do it? Only time will tell.