Across the Seine

In December of ’67, during mid-terms, business student David Corrin dropped out of his college in downtown Manhattan in protest to the war in Vietnam and his own Catholic morality. A month later, he is in a tiny hotel in Paris, living among street musicians, professional actors, language teachers and other ex-pats. He soon becomes friends with a motorcycling ex-Army Afro-American, Bethel Green, who is tracking down a Nazi-stolen Renaissance painting among the artists and art dealers of Paris and later Munich, the former home of the Nazi Party. During these months, David also becomes involved with Aline Validot, a student actress with whom he imagines settling down if only he can finish his degree in a French college, rather than returning to the anti-war turbulence back home. In May, however, the streets of Paris explode with month-long student protests that shuts down the Paris universities and then the whole country, nearly toppling the French government, while sweeping up David, Aline and their friends in this conflagration. Desperately, David tries to hold onto his ill-fated romance as the world around him tumbles in a Dantesque whirlwind of human desires, social justice, national politics and global economics. Partly based on the author’s experiences in the spring of Paris, 1968, this novel explores the dimensions of identity, of individualism and community, through art history and the cultural legacies of Catholic and Protestant beliefs in a post-modern, secular world. Read more