While literary fiction usually is thought of as serious and intense, that's not always the case. Take The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain. It's a delightful tale of whimsical what-if when Francois Mitterrand accidentally leaves his Homburg at a Parisian brasserie in the mid-1980s and it's taken up by four different people.
First to pick up the hat is Daniel Mercier, a timid government accountant. He is awed that someone as famous as the president sits next to him in a restaurant that he went to only by chance. From the beginning, Daniel is a man who enjoys life. Laurain's description of Mercier eating and that first oyster can make a reader feel she's sitting at the next table. When Mitterrand and his dining companions leave, the hat is still there. Mercier surprises himself that he is brave enough to put it on his own head.
The next day at work, he uses facts and logic to destroy a miserable scheme dreamed up by his new department chief, one of those unqualified middle men who make the lives of those underneath them miserable. His colleagues are cheered, his boss's boss is impressed and Daniel Mercier is on his way to a far better career than he would have had if he had kept his mouth shut.
At that dinner, Mercier muses:
The important events in our lives are always the result of a sequence of tiny details. The thought made him feel slightly dizzy — or was it the fact that he’d drunk a whole bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse?
Completely by accident, he loses the hat and it is found by a young woman. Fanny Marquant has been biding her time, patient with her married lover but wishing for more from life. Putting on the hat in the rain, she changes her life drastically as Mercier did. The hat next finds its way to Aslan, a talented man who has had something akin to writer's block for years. But he is not a writer. He is one of the world's finest perfume creators. The hat is next worn by Bernard Lavalliere, a member of the upper middle class with a home filled with stuffy antiques going to dinners with his wife where dried chicken draped with tasteless apricots are served as if it was four-star fare.
What connects the four people who find the hat and put it on is not just the hat. It also is their willingness to take notice of what they are doing in their daily lives and to take a positive step, to not be passive. To have this celebrated without it being treacly or not be plausible is a treat.
Underneath this frothy storytelling is an important point about the choices people make in their lives:
What Aslan called a 'parallel life' was actually a perfect illustration of quantum mechanics and of applied developments in probability theory, starting from the hypothesis that everything we do in our lives creates a new universe which does not in any way wipe out the previous universe.
Our lives can be thought of as like a tree hiding a forest of parallel lives in which we aren't exactly the same, nor are we wholly different. In certain of those lives, we wouldn't have married the same person, or lived in the same place, or had the same profession ...
To take the time to wonder if things would have turned out the same had we made other choices, large or small, is to reflect on what matters to us, what we like about our lives and what alternatives are possible. The very idea that there are alternatives is immensely freeing to some people, and inspiring.
But if that seems too much during a hot summer, not to worry. The President's Hat is replete with lovely descriptions of fine dining and pop culture -- one character pretends to be a private detective just like Stacey Keach playing Mike Hammer -- as well as rooms filled with antique furniture and memories of peasant dinners. And, in Venice, there are objects found. Whether due to fate or chance, what happens in Venice goes back to that chance dinner. It is a lovely example of how structure, plot and character can combine to make a story fit together perfectly.
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