The Merry Month of May

361 pages. Royal octavo (9 1/4" x 6") bound in original publisher's black cloth with gilt lettering to spine and facsimile signature of Jones to cover in original pictorial jacket. Book Club edition. The Merry Month of May is author James Jones's 1971 novel concerning the events of the 1968 student revolutions in Paris. It is centered on a rich American family, the Gallaghers, living as expatriates in Paris. There's a good deal of action on the streets -- May in Paris of 1968 during the weeks of student and worker disturbances -- which serves as a backdrop for other pieces of the current action, namely intergenerational conflict and interchangeable sex. As seen through the eyes of Jack Hartley, failed poet-novelist-husband but a very good friend of and to the Gallaghers: Harry, a film maker who favors sex a trois; his New England and next-to-last Puritan wife; and Hill, their son, who is part of the Cohn-Bendit activity until his father appropriates it for a film while also appropriating a seductive little black strumpet called Samantha-Marie. . . . Jones-Hartley has been living in Paris long enough to say "while I was making my toilet"; he's also old enough to be a benevolently avuncular observer and to mention, en passant, Irwin Shaw who like Jones shared a time that was, as well as a future that might have been. Condition: Front end paper lightly stained. Jacket spine ends and corners rubbed else very good in like jacket.