‘Madame Bovary’ redux

Posy SIMMONDS’ “Gemma Bovery” suggests the prose equivalent of a sly riff a jazz musician might play on the theme of Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” Emma, the vulgar, dissatisfied bourgeois housewife, becomes Gemma Tate, an equally dissatisfied London artist and illustrator; the dull-witted widower and medical practitioner Charles Bovary is transformed into Charlie Bovery, an ineffectual antiques restorer with a shrewish ex-wife and two dreary children.

Jilted by her lover, hip restaurant critic Patrick Large, Gemma takes up with Charlie and eventually marries him. Weary of trying to lead a trendy life on limited means and of the nattering presence of Charlie’s ex-wife and kids, Gemma buys an old farmhouse in the small Norman town of Bailleville. After a few months, her enchantment with provincial life in Normandy fades. Bailleville becomes as stifling for Gemma as the fustian Yonville-l’Abbaye was for Emma. Like Emma, Gemma relieves her boredom by having an affair -- with Herve de Bressigny, a minor local aristocrat. And like Flaubert’s Rodolphe Boulanger, Herve ends the affair by abandoning his married paramour. A brief reunion with Patrick (echoing Emma’s disastrous relationship with Leon Dupuis) proves equally disappointing.

All of Gemma’s activities are scrupulously detailed by Raymond Joubert, the local baker and intellectual manque, who serves both as narrator and as stand-in for Flaubert’s pedantic pharmacist, M. Homais. Joubert is initially intrigued by the similarity between Gemma’s name and the title of the original novel. He observes her with a mixture of lechery, fascination and dread, believing she’s repeating the deeds that led to Emma’s ruin and suicide. After her death, Gemma’s diaries provide an alternate reading of her activities -- and Joubert’s comeuppance.

“Gemma Bovery” was initially published as a serial in 1999 in the Guardian, where Simmonds worked as an illustrator and cartoonist before her success as a children’s author. But it’s really a novella with illustrations, rather than a graphic novel comparable to David B.’s “Epileptic” or the Hernandez brothers’ “Palomar” and “Locas.” Virtually the entire story is told in the text, and Simmonds captures the slightly stilted rhythm of French translated into not-quite-idiomatic English. Early in the story, Joubert ruminates on a compliment Gemma paid to his bread: “And if I do nothing else in my life but perpetuate the love of good honest bread, then I shall be content. Bread for me is a passion. It is our patrimony.”

Simmonds’ drawings do little more than provide the characters with a visual identity; neither their expressions nor their body language communicates anything that wasn’t already clear from the words. New Yorker cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempe balanced vivid drawings and a pastiche of French literature more deftly in his charming “Par Avion.”

Though it’s not absolutely necessary to have read Flaubert to enjoy “Gemma,” familiarity with the earlier novel makes the parallels clearer and the ironies sharper. The obvious audience for “Gemma Bovery” is college students who had “Madame Bovary” assigned in a literature class and found the novel a slog. *