Lost in America

Since its publication in France in May, Douglas Kennedy’s The Woman in the Fifth has sold more than 200,000 copies and dominated best-seller lists. The novel will enjoy similar success when it appears in a dozen other countries over the next few months. That’s an easy prediction to make because a) like the American author’s six previous novels, this one is brisk, brainy and enjoyable, and b) each of those titles has sold at least half a million copies worldwide.

Just don’t look for The Woman in the Fifth in the U.S. — it does not have a publisher there. Kennedy, 52, is an international literary franchise, but he can’t get shelf space in the land of his birth. He may be the most successful American novelist America doesn’t know.

Not that he minds. “Everyone should have my problems,” says Kennedy, in the elegant 19th century London house he shares with his wife and their two children. They have other homes in Paris and Berlin, and on the Maltese island of Gozo. “I’m published in every English-speaking country in the world except the U.S. I’m translated into 18 languages, including Romanian and Lithuanian. They love me in Vilnius.”

As they once did in New York City. He grew up there (his father was a commodities broker; his mother worked at NBC), attending expensive U.S. schools and working in off-Broadway theaters. He went to Dublin at age 21 to start a cooperative theater group and ended up running the respected Abbey Theatre’s second stage. He also wrote a few plays and a column for the Irish Times. In 1988, Kennedy and his wife moved to London, where he cranked out four travel books and a novel, The Dead Heart, about a burned-out U.S. journalist who flees to Australia. Sold to Hollywood, it became the 1997 turkey Welcome to Woop Woop.

Then, says Kennedy, came “my 15 minutes of fame.” The Big Picture — featuring a New York City lawyer on the run from a crime of passion — brought him a $1.1 million deal from New York’s Hyperion Books and billing as the next John Grisham. He got $1 million for his next thriller, The Job, about an ambitious young salesman enmeshed in a web of deceit. Like its predecessor, the book sold decently but failed to earn back the advance. “On the book tour, I could sense it was tanking,” Kennedy recalls. “I was 41. I decided I was going off to write what I wanted.”

That was The Pursuit of Happiness, a sweeping love story set in postwar New York City. It was more a romance than a thriller, and no U.S. publisher would touch it. “Then two things happened,” says Kennedy. “First, I began to have success in Europe. Second, doors closed in New York.” The novel thrived overseas, selling 350,000 copies in the U.K. alone. But to American publishers Kennedy was a loser.

They should read his books. Kennedy has the gift — or perhaps curse — of transcending genres. His thrillers are romantic, his romances thrilling, and all of them bristle with literary references and big questions about love and life. Consider The Woman in the Fifth. Harry Ricks, an American academic, loses his job and his marriage over a disastrous fling with a student. He flees to Paris and ends up living and working illegally in a squalid corner of the immigrant-filled 10th arrondissement. He meets a beautiful woman, but she will see him only a few hours a week at her apartment in the tidier fifth arrondissement. Then people who have wronged him start having “accidents.” The police blame Harry, and he begins to suspect that the woman he loves is not what she seems.

The setting is no accident. Kennedy’s Paris flat is not far from the fifth, he is fluent in French and last year was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. One day he was shocked to see Paris police randomly stopping nonwhites. Then, while searching for an obscure cinema (“I’m a big movie buff, five or six a week”), he discovered the 10th arrondissement’s rich stew of African and Asian ethnicity. His novel tries “to look at Paris in a different way,” he says, “through the eyes of immigrants who live there but seldom come in contact with white French natives.”

Kennedy’s next novel returns him — in his imagination, at least — to his homeland. “This one is set in Boston. It’s called Leaving the World. It’s got a woman narrator, and it’s about what happens when tragedy enters your life. Hey, I shouldn’t be telling you all this!” Not that premature disclosure could do much to diminish his sales. Not even the obstinacy of American publishers can do that.