Cataclysmic relations: Franco-American discord in Diane Johnson's L'Affaire.

The article discusses the portrayal of Franco-American relations in Diane Johnson's novel "L'Affaire." The novel, set in France concludes with the imminent departure of its heroine, Amy Hawkins. Human and geological shifts combine in the novel to produce a series of cataclysms, at once natural and cultural, comic and tragic, and literal as well as figurative. America's apparent eagerness to make Francophobia the same essential trait of American national identity that it has always been for the British paradoxically marks the U.S. as every bit as European as France.