Vivienne Yellow, the unforgettable narrator of this arresting and witty debut, is an American woman who lies in traction in a Parisian hospital, her leg shattered after she was accidentally hit by a truck. Through hazy wormholes of memory, colored by her own morphine-stoked sexual longings, we are drawn into her past: Exactly what happened to her as she tried to cross rue de Cherche Midi, her wildly adulterous marriage to an emotionally distant man, and her relationship with her father, the...