In her new book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fic­tion, Deb­o­rah Levy plays with the bound­aries between fic­tion and truth to tell the sto­ry of a British writer in Paris who is strug­gling to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom the nar­ra­tor knows both ​“too much and noth­ing at all.” 

The narrator’s research, moti­vat­ed by her deep curios­i­ty about the elu­sive and often con­tra­dic­to­ry artist, is intense­ly inter­twined with anec­do­tal sto­ries of her shift­ing rela­tion­ships with her two clos­est friends in Paris — sweet, smart Eva and head­strong, queer Fan­ny. Although the nar­ra­tor claims to know lit­tle about the women, almost all of her time out­side of work­ing on her essay is devot­ed to a sur­pris­ing invest­ment in the search for Eva’s beloved pet cat, whom the friends inter­change­ably call ​“Bob” and sim­ply ​“it.” 

As the fic­tion pro­gress­es, though, it becomes clear that the search for ​“it” is a red her­ring in the narrator’s true aim. In fact, the entire book is devot­ed to the art of a search: for the cat, for a com­plete under­stand­ing of Stein, and for mean­ing­ful con­nec­tion with the peo­ple she meets along the way. 

The book opens with two dis­tin­guish­able cat­e­gories of writ­ing: the first, bio­graph­i­cal por­tions of Gertrude Stein’s life, and the sec­ond, a more con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive about the narrator’s time work­ing on her writ­ing and research while spend­ing time with Fan­ny and Eva. 

Along the way, though, much like Gertrude Stein, Levy defies tra­di­tion­al genre norms. The sep­a­rate threads of research and life become increas­ing­ly entan­gled, com­plex­i­fy­ing the prose to cre­ate a mul­ti­fac­eted work of art that pulls read­ers into the kalei­do­scop­ic lives of both Gertrude Stein and Levy’s unnamed narrator. 

The nar­ra­tor com­plains that Stein’s writ­ing is repet­i­tive and con­fus­ing, but as she deep­ens her research, she becomes so immersed in it that even the nar­ra­to­r­i­al por­tions begin to mim­ic the wind­ing, rhyth­mic tone of Stein’s own writ­ing. This man­i­fests most obvi­ous­ly through the narrator’s own insis­tent rep­e­ti­tion (like a catch­phrase describ­ing Eva’s eyes) and the rejec­tion of tra­di­tion­al gram­mat­i­cal norms, like using com­mas as a pause point. 

Even her rela­tion­ships with Fan­ny and Eva — which seem shal­low at first — rep­re­sent Stein’s writ­ing, notably exist­ing only in the con­tin­u­ous present. The nar­ra­tor is com­plete­ly com­fort­able with the uncer­tain­ty of know­ing them only in the moment that they are cur­rent­ly in, rather than try­ing to force an under­stand­ing of their famil­ial his­to­ry or back­grounds. Through these dis­creet ref­er­ences to and imi­ta­tions of Stein — even dur­ing the narrator’s depic­tions of her per­son­al life — Levy illus­trates how the lines between art and life blur when an artist is whol­ly absorbed in a project. 

Apt­ly named ​“a fic­tion” rather than ​“a nov­el,” the book points to the inter­sec­tions between truth, art, and exag­ger­a­tion, as gen­res bend and blend to cre­ate a tru­ly orig­i­nal work. Just like Stein’s own wield­ing of mod­ernism, this fic­tion com­plete­ly sub­verts expec­ta­tions, immers­ing read­ers in its intri­ca­cies just as the nar­ra­tor is in her research. It is meta, it is unusu­al, and its sur­pris­es con­tin­ue to the last page.