Spare Prose Illuminates a Woman’s Secrets in a Gray City of Light

“This is how it is. It’s as if I’m watching you stare at the lines nom, prenom, on which have been typed Wilcox, Sabine, fingering the edge of your student card.” So begins Samantha Dunn’s first novel, and these two sentences, with their abrupt switch to the second person, indicate a radical alienation. The “you” Sabine addresses isn’t the reader but herself--an earlier self, perhaps, viewed by a Sabine more mature than the 19-year-old in the story, but also a self the Sabine identified as “I” doesn’t want to be.

Sabine (“Bean” to her friends in Mesilla, N.M.) has survived a broken family and a trailer-park upbringing, and ridden a Lions Club scholarship to Paris, dreaming that “French would cover me with civilization, a protective coating I could wear for the rest of my life.” But Paris is gray and damp, the people are hard to get close to and the college where she studies is second-rate. Sabine has “used skin like currency,” and now she’s pregnant.

In that opening scene, Sabine has reported to a clinic for the psychological exam required by French law before she can have an abortion. The French word for that procedure, avortement, can be translated as “failure”; hence the title, which also refers to Sabine’s failure to measure up to Mesilla’s image of her as a poster girl for hard work and can-do spirit, her failure to take advantage of what Paris had to offer.

Indeed, we wonder: What is wrong with her? Despite her intelligence, despite the unconscious arrogance of an attractive young woman who takes sexual attention, wanted or unwanted, as her due, Sabine is severely depressed. Her affairs have been casual--she has no idea who her baby’s father is--and sometimes dangerous: In one scene, she lets a bartender take her down into a cellar after hours; in another, she fights off a rapist. Homesickness and culture shock seem insufficient explanations.

Dunn, a Malibu resident, has the answers we want, but she withholds them for maximum effect. “Failing Paris,” like Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays,” is the kind of novel that seems polished clean of every extraneous word, shaped, like a bullet, for pure velocity.

Sabine has seven days to wait after the exam. Fluctuating between “I” and “you,” she meets two more men: Paquin, a middle-aged artist for whom she poses nude to pay for the abortion, and Abe, a young Arab who has lived in San Diego. Comic misunderstanding (Abe thinks she’s French; she thinks he’s American) leads to what, under different circumstances, might be romance. Meanwhile, she flashes back to her life in New Mexico, where the answers are lurking.

Sabine has no father. She is the product of a brief liaison between her alcoholic mother and a shadowy foreigner. Her New England grandmother is a snob who condemns Sabine’s mother for “living like a Mexican.” Her mother’s boyfriend is Nick Navarro, a Vietnam veteran “who sometimes was an embracing, warm man, but who sometimes tied off and stored his blood in the refrigerator. If there was enough heroin in his system [it] would be strong enough for a fix when he couldn’t score.”

What drives Sabine to have the abortion is her dread of succumbing to the family pattern and producing another fatherless child. And there’s a final revelation, involving a gun and a barn, that Dunn saves for the end and, again, hones to the fewest possible words.

Such fierce control over her material, coupled with feeling and beauty of language, makes “Failing Paris” (available only directly from the publisher, online at https://www.tobypress.com) the successful debut that it is. By giving us exactly enough, Dunn makes us wish there were more.