58 pages • 1 hour read
Lucy FoleyThe Paris Apartment
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Trusting One’s Instincts
Throughout the novel, instinct drives the protagonist. Jess’s instinct is born out of her past. It is revealed that she first learned to trust her instinct when, as a child, she once had a gut feeling that she should stay home from school to be with her mother; when she ignored that feeling and went to school, she returned to find her mother dead from an overdose. That traumatic experience informs Jess’s resolve to never again ignore her intuition. Her instincts have carried her throughout her experiences in the foster care system, in which she routinely encountered abusive, exploitative people.
One of her most important instincts is her trust in herself. While society may look askance at Jess because she has no close family, home, or secure employment, her street smarts speak for themselves. She can read people and cautiously balances trust against suspicion. She can sense that there is goodness in Nick, but she doesn’t let that outweigh her sense that Nick is hiding something. Similarly, she treats Theo both as an ally and as an enemy. Jess understands that people are multilayered and capable of both aiding her and destroying her. Therefore, the only person she can truly rely on is herself. Though she may live a lonely life, that life is independent and focused on herself. Because of her instincts, she needn’t give up a part of herself to others.
Other characters distrust or mismanage their instincts and consequently struggle, contrasting against Jess’s confidence and confirming that instincts are key to inner security. As a prime example, Sophie is more confident than others but also struggles to control her instincts. Her survival instincts have brought her wealth, but over the years she’s repressed those instincts in order to maintain her veneer of respectability. Her shame over her past is her primary motivation in building emotional barriers between herself and her children. Her affair with Ben brings her happiness because within this affair, Sophie operates only on instinct and can drop all pretenses. The relationship with Ben helps her revive the person she used to be, and she even shares her deepest secret with him. Though Ben was using her for his story, Sophie regains control over her body and happiness by feeding her instinct to be with Ben.
Instinct is an especially important literary device in a mystery thriller. Even if Jess could trust an institution like the police department, she would still need to make her own decisions about whom to trust and whose version of the truth to accept. Her inability to go to the police heightens the novel’s tension: As she can trust only herself, this raises the stakes of her investigation. However, instinct is sometimes incorrect, which is another reason it fits into the genre. In struggling to assess a character’s instinct, readers can participate in the journey of questioning every revelation and hypothesizing after each plot twist.
Wealth as a Disguise for Iniquity
Wealth is a defining element of the upper class, which the novel portrays as a constructed status that allows people to hide from the real world. The Meunier family’s immense wealth provides them security and distance from everyday problems: It’s easy for them to live well, and the cushion of wealth helps them mitigate (and avoid) the consequences of their actions. However, wealth also impedes the characters’ growth, keeping the Meuniers from personal development and allowing them to indulge their unprincipled desires with impunity.
The apartment building’s symbolism conveys this theme as the building insulates the wealthy residents from the grittier realities of Paris, and this security enables their ignorance of what is going on in the world. While the Meuniers drink expensive wine and live lavishly, other Parisians risk their lives in violent protests over taxes and gas prices. The luxurious building thus both represents Parisian society’s class strata and criticizes how wealth can divide community. Even when the Meuniers start to understand that their wealth comes from commercialized sexual assault, they ignore the reality that their lifestyles are dishonest and immoral.
Wealth can cause more problems than it solves, particularly when it underlies an abuse of power. Sophie believed that marrying into wealth would liberate her, but instead her husband used his money to control her. For decades, Jacques used his wealth to trap Sophie, and she endured the constant fear that people would discover her past. Wealth gives Sophie’s life a glamorous appearance, but in reality, this wealth makes her more susceptible to betrayal, criticism, and endangerment. In contrast, Jess has no wealth, and she has nothing to lose. Though she is lonely and constantly hustling to survive, she is capable and able to make her own decisions, follow her instincts, and pursue adventure. Jess is not beholden to a tyrant—partly because of her lower socioeconomic status, but also because she, unlike Sophie, has never been trafficked and has never faced the immeasurable, culturally enforced shame and stigma that Sophie faces. Wealth inspires greed, and greed fuels the sex-trafficking business behind Sophie’s plight.
Nick struggles with wealth because he is ashamed that he lives off his father’s money. Nick is not a bad character and has the potential for autonomy, but the seduction of wealth prevents his personal development. Ben, eager to be wealthy, enjoys the Meunier family because they allow him a vicarious experience of prosperity. Ben’s ability to integrate into elite circles makes him feel that he is not glued to his insecure past. He also sees the Meuniers as a ticket to an illustrious journalist career; just like the sex-trafficking business, Ben’s motivations demonstrate that the drive for wealth can be corruptive. In this novel, money does not buy happiness; it robs characters of their self-respect and autonomy.
The Power of Family Loyalty
Family is a crucial dynamic in this novel. Jess and Ben have only each other to claim as family, though their relationship is ruptured. Ben was adopted into a stable family, but little is revealed about his current relationship with that family. This implies that Ben never accepted (or was never accepted by) his new family. In contrast, Jess grew up without a stable family, and she nurtures her connection to Ben. The siblings didn’t really grow up together, and their primary connection is their shared trauma. Even so, Jess is willing to risk her life to find Ben when he disappears.
The Meuniers are an image of a family that, on the surface, looks perfect. Jacques is the wealthy father, Sophie is the beautiful wife, Antoine and Nick are the dutiful sons, and Mimi is the darling youngest child. However, the family is rife with conflict. When they meet Jess, they don’t disclose their family relationship; while they don’t lie about being family, they don’t advertise it either. Their secrecy is partly fear-driven, but it’s also evident that some of them don’t see each other as family. Antoine especially rejects Sophie, as he is tortured by memories of his dearly departed mother. Nick successfully passes as a Brit, implying that he is eager to distance himself from his family while taking advantage of their wealth. Mimi is especially insecure within these family dynamics; because others know or suspect she was adopted, they treat her as an outsider. Still, when Ben and Jess threaten the family’s stability, they band together. Nick’s brotherly protectiveness exemplifies this family loyalty. Antoine is violent in the throes of his alcohol addiction, but Nick resents others’ criticism of Antoine because Nick knows the trauma behind Antoine’s condition and must protect his family name to protect himself.
There are layers of family in this novel. Sophie embraces Mimi as her own daughter, though their relationship is not biological. This reveals that Sophie, despite her tough and cold exterior, has emotional depth. Sophie is Nick and Antoine’s stepmother, but they treat one another as business associates. Even so, their loyalty proves that a family built from business can still involve genuine care.
Ben and Jess reestablish their fractured sibling relationship because of Jess’s fortitude and her refusal to abandon Ben. Actions, not blood or a shared upbringing, inform their family. Sophie, too, expresses her family commitment through actions, regardless of blood ties. Thus, though both families are imperfect, they are still family. Their survival comes through familial support, even when this support chips away at their individuality.
The novel ends well for the concierge, whose life was upended by her daughter’s death at the hands of Jacques’s trafficking. She spends decades working in a lonely and little-respected job so she can be close to Mimi, her secret granddaughter. As the narrative closes, her new life includes Mimi; Jess sees the concierge boarding a train for the South of France, where Mimi was sent to recuperate. The novel’s happy ending is that the concierge’s diligent loyalty to her family is rewarded.
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