A Literary Hoax-en-Paris

Paul West, 27, left his native Britain a year ago to help launch a chain of English tea rooms in Paris. He kept a diary of his adventures and published 200 copies privately, mostly for friends. But Paris bookstores discovered West's gently satirical look at Gallic foibles, radio stations invited him to discuss it, and now the book, A Year in the Merde (Bantam Press; 335 pages), is poised to become an international publishing phenomenon. After a high-profile auction in July, Bantam won British rights to Merde for nearly $140,000, and the book is being rushed into U.K. stores in September. Publishers in the U.S., France and Germany have anted up for their own editions. Movie rights have been sold.

This success story is all absolutely true, except that Paul West is not in his 20s, did not arrive in Paris two years ago, launch any tea rooms or keep a diary. Oh, and he isn't Paul West. His real name is Stephen Clarke, and he's a 45-year-old Oxford-educated Briton who works as an editor in Paris and has lived there for 11 years. "I saw the movie Chocolat," he says, "and the idea of a British woman opening a chocolate shop and working in a French village seemed so wrong, so un-French. Then I read [Peter Mayle's bestselling] A Year in Provence and noticed that the first word is 'January.' I thought, No! The French year begins in September, when people come back from holiday. So I knew there was a book to be written."

Determined to set foreigners straight about his adopted home, Clarke began compiling anecdotes. But he wanted a sexier protagonist than himself, so he opted for fiction and invented Paul West, "a cross between Hugh Grant and David Beckham." He also wanted to hide behind a pseudonym, not to avoid trouble with his employers, "but because if the book failed, I'd look like an idiot." That danger having receded, Clarke is using his own name for the U.K. edition. "I was a little worried when I started giving readings in Paris, since I'm clearly not 27," he says. "Hardly anybody noticed."

Perhaps they were too busy laughing — or fuming — at the cultural mishaps of young West, whose tea-room project is undermined by work-shy French colleagues and Iraq-fueled anti-British sentiment. Merde, named after the residue found on Paris sidewalks, takes swipes at such institutions as government ("a French politician without a mistress is like a sheriff without a gun — people think he has no firepower"), cheek-kissing ("if ever there's a serious epidemic of facial herpes, they'll have to get condoms for their heads"), kitchen utensils ("no wonder the French make such good engineers — you need a degree in industrial design just to cook dinner") and even Marianne, the French Uncle Sam: "This being France, instead of a bearded old uncle who looks as if he should be advertising fried chicken, they have a seminaked woman."

The book also imparts practical advice. If you order café au lait, beer or water at a restaurant, you're likely to get skinned; instead, demand a crème, a demi or a carafe de l'eau, as the French do. To wiggle out of a house purchase, ask your bank to deny you a mortgage. At dinner, don't commit the cheese-course gaffe of cutting the tips off Brie and Camembert wedges; instead try the fragrant Cantal, "like soft Cheddar, with a hint of athlete's foot."

As a prose stylist, Clarke can't hold a cheese knife to legions of past Anglo-Saxon observers like Mark Twain and Janet Flanner (or even to Mayle). But Merde has a lively plot — West's French boss is up to no good — plus an element missing in many such tomes: sex. The hero's success in learning to separate politesse from a French woman's true intentions is instructive, as are his graphic descriptions of the rewards.

How much of the book is autobiographical? "Moi, je ne regrette rien," Piafs Clarke, who refuses to talk about his personal life (he is reported to have children in Paris schools). Not that there is much for him to regret these days. Bantam and other publishers are looking at his two previous unpublished novels, and Clarke is at work on a sequel to Merde. "I just love this whole cultural clash thing," says the man caught in it for more than a decade. "There's so much to say."