The digital age has been kind to Éric Rohmer. One of the leading filmmakers of the French New Wave of the 1950s and ’60s, Rohmer remains popular today, thanks to the recent streaming availability of his major films. From La collectionneuse (1967) to A Tale of Autumn (1998), his stories of chatty, fashionable characters who muse about their complicated emotions and personal moral codes at work, on the beach, and in the bedroom, are still as aspirational as they are insightful. An Instagram account, @RohmerFits, posts stills of chic costumes from across Rohmer’s oeuvre, and even advertises a fragrance collaboration named after Rohmer’s The Green Ray (1986). The account was featured in a 2023 New York Times trendpiece hyping “Eric Rohmer Summer.”

Three years later, Rohmer remains just as popular. McNally Editions, an independent New York press that describes itself as “devoted to elevating unduly neglected books and authors,” has just published the first English translation of Élisabeth, Rohmer’s only novel. Written in the early 1940s during the Nazi occupation of France and published in 1946, when Rohmer was just twenty-six, the book was barely covered in the press and sold poorly. “I detested that novel,” Rohmer later said. “I wanted to distance myself from it because it seemed sterile to me.” Near the end of his life, his attitude toward the book softened. He oversaw a reprint under the new title La Maison d’Élisabeth [Élisabeth’s House] and gave a short interview on it, reproduced at the back of the English edition. 

Compared to Rohmer’s precisely plotted films, Élisabeth is structurally undisciplined. Set in the hottest week of August, the book episodically recounts the vacations of six characters whose relations to one another are implied rather than defined. Several chapters pass with many of their names going unmentioned. As in many of Rohmer’s films, most of the story is told through dialogue, showcasing his knack for reproducing natural dialogue and informal speech. Translator Aaron Kerner has preserved the cadence of Rohmer’s French, retaining ‘M.’ and ‘Mme.’ before surnames, as well as “bonjour” and “au revoir.” 

The central character in Élisabeth is Michel, a young man spending the summer with the Roby family at their home near the town of Percy, in Normandy. Michel is at a transitional age: he’s old enough that others remark on it but he’s not fully ready to see himself as an adult. At the novel’s start, Élisabeth Roby, a much older woman with children, catches Michel painting in her yard as Michel turns to her “with a start, like a little boy caught in the act.” Élisabeth frequently goads Michel about his age. “You’re already joining the ranks of the elderly,” she wryly tells him, noting that he hasn’t spent any time in the water all summer. 

Michel is also something of a foil to her son Bernard, who just graduated high school in the spring. “You certainly weren’t a bit like him at his age,” Élisabeth tells Michel. In one of the more unusual episodes in the book, Michel meets a group of vacationers on the road and introduces himself as Bernard, borrowing all his biographical details, as if appropriating the younger boy’s identity could ward off adulthood. Bernard, for his part, is more perceptive than the older Michel; he’s always known that Michel has ulterior motives for summering with the Robys.

In fact, Michel comes every summer to see another woman, Irène, a few years his senior and already a widow. Michel and Irène are on the verge of planning an engagement, but two obstacles stand in the way: Michel’s boss wants to send him to Portugal on an apprenticeship, and their feelings have started to sour. When Irène suggests that he ought to seriously consider relocating for work, Michel responds aggressively, pinning her to her bed and threatening to kill her, through laughter that only makes the situation worse. Communication between the couple deteriorates. Michel notices it first in Irène’s behavior; she becomes “stiff…like an object” and closes herself off emotionally, finally bursting into tears she will not or cannot explain to Michel, who spends the next day stewing in anger: “I hate her to the point of death.” By the end of the novel’s first part Irène sends Michel away, reasoning that they no longer love each other.

Michel’s love troubles account for only about a third of the novel. The rest of the book consists of vignettes concerning the members of the Roby family. Bernard has run-ins with various neighborhood kids and gets caught in torrential rain with a girl, turning their shared misfortune into serendipity. Marie-Thérèse, Bernard’s younger sister, plays with her older cousin Claire and generally keeps out of the affairs of the adults around her. Élisabeth has the most obligations and gets to enjoy summertime the least. At the height of the heatwave she goes into the city for a dentist appointment and nearly passes out from heat exhaustion. These interlocking episodes are as desultory as the dog days of summer; that may be seasonally appropriate, but together with Michel’s storyline they never coalesce into a satisfying narrative whole.

Equally unsatisfactory is the resolution of Michel’s affair with Irène. After parting with her at the beginning of the novel, Michel, cosplaying as Bernard, has a fraught encounter with a girl closer to his own age (which by her estimates is “shy of twenty-five”). He treats this stranger with the same barely-suppressed violence he showed earlier with Irène. Seeking an outside opinion on his failing relationship, Michel lunges at the girl’s throat then later restrains her by the arms and demands to know what type of woman she thinks is right for him. Noncommittally, she tells him both “someone about your age” and “I could certainly see you with a woman a little older.” Good enough. Michel goes back to Irène, who apologizes for her past behavior (ignoring his) and peppers him with questions, desperate for reassurance that he isn’t angry with her. “But why should I be angry with you,” he says unconvincingly, “you make me laugh.” It’s less reconciliation than wishful thinking.

The heroes and heroines of Rohmer’s films are typically opaque to themselves, and in this regard Michel, unable to process his emotions nonviolently, fits right in with them. What’s lacking in Élisabeth is the kind of insight into youth that an author can only possess with distance from it. Rohmer almost never made films about people his own age; by contrast, he was about Michel’s age at the time he wrote the novel. Whereas Michel is anxious about adulthood and its attendant responsibilities, the young Rohmer seems impatient to join the ranks of the great adults who told stories before him. Élisabeth is not a great novel, but it may yet serve a purpose. Reading it throws into sharper focus the psychological acuity of the mature Rohmer’s works. There’s much more to his films than pleasant talk and stylish surfaces.

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