By Michael Tidemann
“Paris by the Book” by Liam Callanan (The Cloud Atlas) is a novel about a troubled writer who disappears without a trace but leaves behind subtle clues for his family to follow him from Milwaukee, Wis., to Paris. 
Authored by Liam Callanan, who serves in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and who was previously its chair as well as coordinator of its Ph.D. program in creative writing, the novel is at the same time a mystery, romance and a labyrinthine tale of a man gone missing not out of a desire to abandon his family but to find himself.
Leah Eady, the main character and narrator, met her husband Robert after she tried to shoplift a book from a bookstore. After Robert, a promising writer, pays for the book she “lifted”, they eventually marry. However, their marriage is fraught with difficulty from the beginning. Robert’s “writeaways”, starting even on their honeymoon, become longer and longer. Leah only asks that Robert leave a note when he embarks on his writing jaunts. Then the notes end and Robert vanishes altogether. Leah and her teenage daughters Ellie and Daphne are shattered by Robert’s disappearance. They hold out hope that this is just one more of Robert’s writeaways and he’ll return. When he doesn’t, Leah finds a cryptic message in a granola box and plane tickets Robert booked for them to Paris. Leah takes the girls to Paris where her instincts move her to buy a partnership in a bookstore. Eleanor, a friend of the family and a university English department chair, forwards the beginning of a manuscript Robert had written and that had somehow been routed to a printer at the math department. The manuscript offers clues that mirror the life of a family much like the Eadys living in Paris.
“Appearances” by Robert begin. We as readers can’t be sure if they’re real or not. Those appearances lead to a surprising ending that’s left to our own interpretation. Personally, I wonder if Eleanor may not have had a greater role than is revealed in the novel. Callanan writes remarkably from a woman’s perspective and his description of the gritty back streets of Paris is gripping: “Opposite the monastery, a succession of shops like ours, peering out from the ground floors of anonymous flat-front buildings in various shades of cream forever staining yellow.” This is a great book, one hard to put down. Michael Tidemann writes from Estherville, Iowa. His author page is amazon.com/author/michaeltidemann.