Degas Must Have Loved a Dancer

A young artist and poet circle about solitary fantasies of one another—each afraid to commit any further after a chance meeting on a bus when the artist sketches the poet, whose hair has turned shockingly white despite her youth. Kismet, every character in the novel repeatedly tells these two. Kismet. How can you not go for it? Set in Europe, where these young Americans have travelled, one to take a nanny’s job in France, the other to debut his works in a cousin’s gallery, the novel reveals a good deal about the Euro youth scene, while working out the carpe diem theme in a most devastating manner.