The narrative, advancing at a stately pace, sometimes sags. Flaubert, scratching away with his quill pen in Normandy, doles out drama with a stingy hand. Brown takes great pains to place Flaubert in his time, setting the political stage for the great upheavals of 1848 and 1870, but his subject refuses to take part. As the 1848 uprising in Paris boils all around him, Flaubert wanders through the uproar like a somnambulist, untouched, like a silent-film comedian unaware as a house collapses around him.
Brown's interpretations of individual works tend to be pedestrian, even term-paperish. But he excels at extended character sketches, and populates Flaubert's surprisingly crowded world with a colorful group of literary all-stars, including Zola, the Goncourt brothers, Guy de Maupassant, Ivan Turgenev and the enormously sympathetic Sand, who did the valuable work of supporting or deflating Flaubert when he most needed it.
Brown makes the most of his few narrative opportunities. He gives a spirited account of Flaubert's tour of the Near East with his friend Maxime du Camp, a riot of exotic color and nonstop sex. He also mines gold in Flaubert's tempestuous relationship with Colet, a writer and the paramour of several famous writers, whose sense of personal drama and colossal self-absorption made her a worthy match for the man she would later call "that insidious Norman."
Passionate, determined and myopic, Colet stalked Flaubert for decades, undeterred by his wizardly evasions. "I tried to love you and do love you in a way that isn't the way of lovers," he once told her, in a typically maddening formulation. Colet, in love and in anger, was more direct. "I scorn his character utterly and am revolted by his premature decrepitude," she fumed, as the affair reached its endgame.
Flaubert gave to his art what he refused to give to women: constancy, devotion, passion. Until he wrote Madame Bovary, his lofty pronouncements, Brown subtly suggests, were more than slightly defensive. Flaubert showed contempt for a public he knew he could not please. He turned his back on honors unlikely to be offered.
With Madame Bovary there came a turning point. "I'm seeking the high seas rather than safe harbor," he wrote to a friend, with absolute confidence. "If I sink, you're excused from mourning me." It was full speed ahead, at a painstaking, perfectionist crawl to Salammbo, Sentimental Education, Three Tales, Bouvard and Pecuchet. Fame and acclaim, repellent though they might be, came his way. Immortality, too.
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