The Paris Apartment Review

My first response to The Paris Apartment was curiosity. My later response was an argument with the way it handles exploitation. Jess arrives at her brother's expensive Paris apartment and finds him missing while every resident appears to be hiding something. I did not need another twist before the closed-building setting entered the setup. I needed the people affected by wealth around the closed-building setting to feel specific, and mostly they did.

The people gave wealth its real pressure through the closed-building setting. Jess's stubborn outsider view drives the search, though the building's residents are more intriguing as a group than individually. The person on the page is allowed to be inconsistent about wealth, which made the choices easier to trust. I was most attentive during the closed-building setting, hidden passages, multiple narrators, and elegant facade covering an exploitative system. The attention paid to the closed-building setting gives the larger question of wealth a human scale.

For me, the real argument concerns wealth and exploitation. The plot matters because it forces wealth and exploitation into practical choices, where a clean belief becomes harder to maintain.

I did lose confidence when the residents blur together, coincidences accumulate, and the reveal is less surprising than the atmosphere. A little more patience would have made the material around wealth easier to believe.

I found myself rereading the section around the closed-building setting, because it changes the emotional meaning of wealth without announcing the change.

The book works better as a study of wealth than as a perfectly balanced plot. The closed-building setting is the part I remember first.