I ended up reading A Good Year, by Peter Mayle. It was on the top of the pile, and it seemed like a sensible place to start.

That, and I knocked off one book for the Armchair Traveler Challenge.

A Good Year was a good book. Not a great book, though I think it may have aspired to greatness. Or maybe not. The best way to describe it is very laid-back. But then, it’s set Provence, and they’re nothing if not laid back there, right?

So the basic plot: Max is a London something-or-other high powered (never did figure out what), and he gets one-upped by this total jerk at work. So, in a fit of anger, he quits. Jobless, and soon to be homeless, he checks his mail and discovers that he’s inherited a house and vineyard from his uncle who recently died. So, encouraged by a friend, he moves to Saint-Pons and tries to begin again.

There’s heavy elements in there — Max’s midlife crisis, trying to fit in to a foreign culture, romance, wine smuggling (if you could call it that). But there just wasn’t the tension needed to make a really good book. It’s hard to feel anger for the wine smugglers (since they’re taking a batch of wine made in the vineyard and jacking up the prices and keeping the profits; smuggling is the wrong word, but you get the idea) since you never really get to know the “bad guys” (they just kind of appear and disappear). The only one you can even get a sense for is Nathalie, but even she’s not that fully developed as a character.

It’s hard to feel passion for the romance, since it just kind of happens in the background, too. Empty-shell, hard-on-love Max finds romance in Provence. No tension. It just happens. And it’s not all that satisfying when it does. Max also finds friendship in the “quirky” characters that surround him: Roussel, the worker who makes the wine that’s smuggled; Madame Passepartout, the eccentric housekeeper; Christie, the long-lost American daughter of Max’s uncle (there’s a bit of underlying tension there, but it’s easily dissolved).

In short, there’s conflict, and tension, but it’s all in the background. Nothing, really, comes through. What did come through was, well, the wine. Wine tasting, wine growing, wine making, wine drinking. There’s a LOT of wine in the book. And with wine, of course, good food. There’s a lot of that, too. And it’s beautifully described. I can say this about this book: Mayle knows how to describe a place so that you feel like you are there and how to write a good meal so that you can almost taste the food.

But in the end, in spite of the amount of wine that was drunk and the amount of good food that was eaten, it left me unsatisfied. And I find that highly disappointing.