“The English Understand Wool” by Helen DeWitt

This novella has all of the wry sense of humor one can expect from DeWitt. The narrator, a seventeen-year-old girl named Marguerite, is delightfully biting. Much of the story revolves around tailoring—thus the book’s title. Speaking of her Maman, Marguerite reveals, “Linen she did not have made up in London; she took it to a Thai seamstress in Paris. She had in fact accommodated the woman’s desire to move to Paris from Bangkok; it is, after all, quite simple to make brief visits to Paris from Marrakech, whereas one cannot always go to Bangkok when one has had an idea for a frock, a redingote, a smoking.”

As to Marguerite’s home life with Maman, “It was her practice to spend Ramadan abroad…. The servants remained on full pay. They might stay in the riad in Marrakech or visit their families, as they pleased. It would be mauvais ton to be waited upon by persons who were fasting. It would be mauvais ton to make the exigencies of religion an excuse to curtail their salaries.” And her upbringing, “One must not expose adults to childish prattle. She insisted that I should learn bridge at the age of seven because one cannot always assume that a child can be kept out of sight.”

During the course of the novella it does not give too much away to reveal, “At the age of 20 months I had disappeared from the house of Bernard and Marie-Therese Dessanges, the guardians appointed in my parents’ wills should both parents die while I was a minor, and a great deal of money left for me, some 80 million euros… had disappeared.” Marguerite takes it all in stride, “It seemed to me that it would be mauvais ton to unleash the forces of the law on the Thai seamstress, or a young man working his way up through the ranks of a hotel in Geneva…. I was conscious, above all, of extreme anxiety not to be guilty of mauvais ton…. I was conscious of a slighter anxiety. It would not be possible for quite some time, perhaps years, to go to the Thai seamstress—I would inevitably be followed, and whether or not this led to the apprehension of the fugitives it would certainly cause chagrins. Where was I to find a seamstress?”

After her kidnapping has become world news, it seems to surprise Marguerite that others do not comprehend her relationship to her Maman, “I accept that the woman in the early photographs with the infant was my biological mother. At the time of her death, I am told, I was 18 months old. It goes without saying, I could not have made an intelligent choice of guardian at 18 months. Maman gave me the chance, many chances to show I was not a mediocrity, and in this way I earned the right to participate in the life bought with this money by a person of distinction. If I had not done so, she would not have been ungenerous; she would have made provision in accordance with my capacity.” Finally, Marguerite comes to an epiphany, “I had hesitated to approach the Thai seamstress, but I now saw that I had been foolish…. Those who understand clothes might understand the importance of the relationship, but the investigators had shown themselves to be wholly oblivious to matters of taste.”