Introduction
Cosette (puplished in 1995) is a historical novel that wants to be a romance novel and a romance novel that wants to be a historical novel. How do I know this? It uses words like "sinewy," so it's like a romance novel, and it has chapters that broadly describe—and make generalizations about—France’s various revolutions and revolts while the characters are significantly influenced by these events, so it's like a historical novel. However, in practice, it does neither very well: its setting in time somehow lacks a certain crumpled-parchment flavor, and if it were a romance novel, I would assume it would have more sex scenes (though I am not asking for any more; the one from Marius and Cosette's wedding night was plenty, thanks). I've never watched a soap opera (not even one episode—and yes, that's pride you’re detecting), but it seems that they contain melodrama and often focus on multiple generations of a single family and of course the family’s friends, lovers, and enemies. Cosette has some similarities to that genre as well. It could perhaps most appropriately be called a family saga, though not a very serious or compelling one.

But I am ahead of myself. The reason I picked up Cosette to begin with was because every so often I’d encounter a website that said, to paraphrase, "Wow, that Les Misérables sequel Cosette is really bad." You know how when someone says "Don’t look," you do? So I picked it up in 1998 or 1999, depending on if it was winter or spring, and soon after I was done with Cosette I forgot almost every aspect of the experience, except going to the public library to check it out and where in my dorm room I kept it. So the second time I checked it out of the library was because I had forgotten almost everything about it, and I admit I tended to skim when I got bored with the book, and some of the notes I took are illegible, but I think I have the main ideas. And, just to make sure, I admit I got it out a third time (despite the embarrassment of checking out a book with such a cheesy cover).

The Plot
Unfortunately, Jean Valjean is still alive when this book starts. He’s my favorite character, and it’s a shame to see him going through the motions as a simulacrum of his real self. "I am a man who saves others," he tells Marius, even though the laudatory first-person pronoun is anathema to Our Man Valjean. He thinks of a small child as a "brat," and he has apparently spent his days in the covenant trying to grow a blue rose to match Cosette’s eyes. (What else has he got to do?) Nothing he else does is drastically out of character, but he’s more or less just there.

The book, however, starts at the barricades, with Marius joining his besieged comrades in a fit of despair. He does not enter with his dramatic threat to blow up the barricade and everyone on it as in Hugo, but slips in and jollies about with some familiar characters—including Enjolras who is still the leader, but who has stolen Cambronne’s line and shouts "Merde!" at the National Guard—and some new ones, including Verdier, a printer. Eponine arrives with Cosette’s letter and dies after a very long conversation mainly consisting of her asking Marius to keep her warm and Marius agreeing to do so, if at all possible. The exchange is undeniably similar to the musical’s lyrics, and doubtless the book’s scene was inspired by it. At the crucial moment, Enjolras orders men with families to support to leave, and Valjean arrives in time to offer his uniform and deliver the mangled "man who saves others" line. One of the men who receives a uniform—the fifth one, Valjean’s, to be exact—is a burly redhead named Clerons. The fight resumes, and events unfold.

Meanwhile, Cosette is fretful and in love, and in addition to reading and writing love letters that consist of "I love you, I love you, I love you," she attempts to sneak out from Tousaint’s guardianship and find either Valjean or Marius. She is intercepted by Verdier, one of the men saved by the National Guard uniforms, and sent back home.

Anyway, fully informed of Cosette’s anxiety, we are able to move on to the aftermath. In some way, we learn Clerons is looking for the four other escapees and that he’s a police spy. Also, Marius recovers, Valjean hovers, and the wedding goes off as planned. We’re treated to Cosette and Marius’s nuptial happiness, including (I am not making this up) naked whist. In between such activities (no, really, naked whist), Marius tries to be a lawyer and gradually expels Valjean from his house following Valjean’s self-effacing confession. (Yes, naked whist.)

When Thenardier shows up to deliver his fortuitous information, as he does in Hugo, Zelma Thenardier accompanies him (she was bored and didn’t want to stay at home this time). Zelma confronts Cosette, probably out of a deep-seated psychological inadequacy, with her knowledge of Cosette’s past. She somehow knows Valjean is "prisoner 24601," and she lays out Fantine’s history in an unbecoming light (including the selling of her teeth and her descent into prostitution, despite her having no way of knowing these things), using the first of many delightfully urbane scatological references that we’ll find in Cosette. Unsurprisingly, Cosette doesn’t want to know and is upset, but soon enough she and Marius are at Valjean’s bedside wishing him a tearful, though rewritten, farewell.

With Valjean laid to rest, Marius enters the funk he always enters at this stage of Les Misérables sequels. He’s not as strong or kind or worthy as Valjean, he’s a lousy lawyer, the world is unjust and bleak, and naked whist, though fun, just isn’t enough any more. Cosette, fortunately, has become informed about politics, so she can discuss such things at salons, and through the idea of continuing the fight abandoned at the barricades, Marius finds purpose and meaning again. With Verdier, who was one of the five barricade escapees, he founds La Lumière, a radical newspaper.

Time passes. No, really, some years. There’s a strange interlude where Marius and Cosette visit the seashore at Bolounge, witness a young Louis-Napoleon’s abortive French landing, get caught in a squall while sailing, and are rescued by a boat called the St. Joseph that they find, upon looking it up the next day, doesn’t exist. The random supernatural episode closes the first section. Then it’s 1848. So, as I said, time passes.

Marius and Cosette have produced offspring. Their eldest, Jean-Luc, is a troublesome child, who in England might have been called a prat. Their younger is Fantine, who is perfect. Life, however, is not; Marius, who’s considered seditious, has been on trial and in and out of jail constantly—seventy-six times is the tally given—and Cosette holds down the opposition newspaper fort when he’s a guest of the state. Therefore, it falls to her to deal with Jean-Luc’s expulsion from the private, royalist school he had been attending. The fault is "friviolity," and generally this seems to mean drinking and womanizing. Like all good bad boys, he has a buddy, Arsène Huvet, who originally led him astray.

But, a better person, despite being a poor street urchin, is The Starling, who is also sometimes called Le Sansonnet in the text, which is just French for The Starling. He somehow shows up (Cosette saves him from being arrested for petty theft, I believe), is more or less Gavroche, only alive, and is hired to run errands for La Lumière. He thinks the newspaper is great, sleeps in the offices sometimes, and makes a reference to King Louis-Philippe’s having a pear-shaped head, which was remarked upon in real-life political cartoons of the day. "To the king, the crowned pear," he toasts. Personally, I like this little historic reference, but maybe that’s just me.

Also, although I cannot remember if he does anything important, Cousin Théo works for La Lumière. Everyone does, really. Even Clerons, who has infiltrated it and become the managing editor in his quest to track the other four "uniform" escapees, one of whom is Verdier who is a printer and also involved with La Lumière. Fortunately, Pajol, who was a barricade boy, and whom I forgot to mention in the description of the barricade scenes—just like Gavroche, only, again, alive!—returns as a grown man after spending time in the Mont Saint Michele prison, and denounces Clerons, who Pajol has learned is a policeman. Clerons is unabashed at being a spy; The Starling bites his cheek in rage; Marius spurns violence and tells Clerons to get out of La Lumière's offices and never come back, not even to empty out his desk or pick up his coffee mug from the break room. For some reason and in some way (late-night jam sessions with Javert? I think actually it was something like that) Clerons knows who Jean Valjean was, that he was a convict, and that Cosette is his daughter.

With Clerons ferreted out and his superspy powers defused, things are ready for a new round of revolutions and counter-revolutions to take place, namely the February Revolution and the June backlash. A new government is installed, but Marius is not a part of it, and we follow events through passages making generalizations about how hard Marius, Cosette, and the gang work to support their causes. The Starling runs messages like a demon, Pajol joins rebels in the backlash against the newly formed government, and Marius is arrested. The Starling, apparently, is arrested as well.

The Starling is part of the underground of ragpickers and various other Parisian poor, so Cosette goes to the slums to ask Mimi Lascaux, a prostitute who is The Starling’s mother, and thence to Countess Crasseux, and kind of underworld maven who is also known as The Changer for her ready supply of Halloween costumes, to find out where he is being held. Turns out both The Starling and Marius are in the stir at the Concierge, and exciting place to be indeed. Cosette visits Thiers, the self-promoting historian and conservative politician named, in order to get Marius and The Starling out of the slammer. She knows Thiers from Jean-Luc’s school, and he’s rather astute. He likes Order and Property, and his price for their liberty is La Lumière’s future positive opinion and support. Cosette, of course, makes the deal to back Thiers because she loves Marius (even if sometimes their love becomes rather clichéd: their love is like its own country, so they only need each other, we’re reminded multiple times, and by multiple characters, who have apparently held a conference and jointly decided on how they will all describe the relationship). A few days later, a saddened Marius returns home and the mentally very slow Jondrettes, the two youngest Thénardier boys, carry word to Cosette that The Starling is also safe.

Time passes; Marius’s health and spirits remain "impaired" in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolution, and Pajol marries a woman named Germaine. Meanwhile, in another part of the story, we catch up with Zelma, who moves in society (she has slept with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte), is married to a man named Emile-Charles Touchard, and has two daughters (Eponine-Hortense and Corinne). Thenardier is dead, having expired in America after retiring from the slave trade, and Zelma has spent time living in Arkansas, thus satisfying my dream of Les Misérables and Arkansas being closely interconnected. However, once reading in a newspaper that Louis-Napoleon is vying to be elected president of France, Zelma determines to move back home because she now has an "in" to high society.

In all of this there are political allegiances and issues that Marius takes on, mainly that when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte visits him at home and talks sweet, he agrees to give him La Lumière’s support. However, in 1851 Louis-Napoleon starts calling himself the "prince-president," which Marius, the republican, doesn’t like one weensy little bit. Back to the family saga.

One fateful night several things happen at once. First, Jean-Luc, who has continued his bad-boy ways, attends the Théâtre Française with Arsène. Also there are cousin Théo, his girlfriend, and a friend of the Pontmercy’s Beaujard, an artist. There he falls in love—to the extent that he is capable of falling in love—with Nicolette Lauriot, an chorus girl and painters’ model. Beaujard introduces them, as conveniently he is one of her painterly clients. Second, The Starling hangs at the "court" of the Countess Crasseux. There he is offered a pretty girl, but he refuses to tango in the night, as Fleetwood Mac might have said, because, he admits to the Countess, he loves Fantine. Third, Marius and Cosette attend one of Louis-Napoleon’s balls, and who should they see there but Zelma, who Cosette flatteringly notes "looks like a rat in satin." Sorry, rats. She had no call to be insulting you in such a way. Also at the ball, and only slightly less desirable, is Thiers, who we’ll remember is owed a big favor by Cosette. He chooses to call it in by asking for La Lumière’s support of his bid to become France’s next president. Marius turns him down, though he no longer supports Louis-Napoleon either. Still, things are not hunky-dory: on the way home Marius reveals to Cosette that though it’s influential, it’s not a big paper, and La Lumière is slowly going under. We leave the couple to fret and turn again to Jean-Luc.

Jean-Luc and Nicolette they begin an affair, and Nicolette explains that her time is not her own, as she already has a man who "keeps" her, but that she plans to leave her tawdry life when Offenbach, who really digs her singing, is able to produce his own shows. She also tells Jean-Luc what we will learn later is a fictionalized secret origins story involving dreams of the stage and flight from a middle-class provincial family that has an arranged marriage to an older man. In his turn Jean-Luc, in a fit of filial feeling, tells Nicolette that he thinks his father waster his life.

On the home front, Jean-Luc, classic latchkey kid that he is, bribes Fantine not to be a tattle-tale and run out to see Nicolette. Though she gratifyingly remains always the good daughter and spends much of her time in a state of exasperation with Jean-Luc, Fantine has her own romantic possibilities, in as much as she returns The Starling’s love. However, she is slow to notice his affections, and he is slow to confess them, all of which means that there’s an icky scene later on where this previously unspoken attraction is free to manifest itself. Stay tuned.

As if Cosette didn’t have enough on her mind, Zelma and her two lovely daughters pay a visit on he Pontmercys, but only Aunt Adelaide, Fantine, and Jean-Luc are home. Undeterred, though, Fantine handles the situation with the best aplomb she can muster, and Zelma makes reference to being an old friend of Cosette’s.

Some months pass, Fantine teaches The Starling to read, and Zelma returns and meets Cosette. This gives her the opportunity to demand five hundred francs as blackmail in exchange for Zelma not spreading lies about Cosette, now that she, Zelma, moves in elite social circles. Cosette refuses to capitulate, occasioning a detailed account of Cosette’s parentage and her mother’s fate, including an inaccurate embellishment that makes Jean Valjean one of Fantine’s customers. How does Zelma know all these details—the shorn hair, the pulled teeth, the fall from grace?—"My father found out." Huh? Cosette touchingly sticks up for Fantine, saying "My mother loved me, died loving me, my father died loving me. What of your father, Zelma? How did he die?" Before the situation degenerates into yo’ father jokes, we skip away.

There is little rest for poor Cosette, who stumbles from bad to worse. While strolling with Marius in the Luxembourg Gardens, they meet Jean-Luc and Nicolette and immediately pick up on the relationship. Awkward introductions all around! Marius is furious and tells Jean-Luc to go home where they will discuss matters in the evening. All this trauma triggers a heart-to-heart with Marius, in which Cosette tells Marius about Zelma’s demands and her mother’s sad history. "You forgive me for not telling you all this before?" Cosette asks Marius. "How did you know all this before?" the readers ask Cosette. With their love reaffirmed though healthy communication and joint decision-making, just like Dear Abby wants, Cosette and Marius are ready to go home, but instead they decide to go off to Boulogne for some reason or another—perhaps they’re due a vacation. Jean-Luc, feeling deserted by his parents who are always way into their political crusades, runs to Nicolette for nookie, but she already has her "keeper" in line. Fantine is not much comfort to him either, as she says she will marry a rich man for love and flounces off.

That same night, Louis-Napoleon stages a successful coup, and Clerons (remember him?), who is now commissioner of police and has arranged the coup (and who has a menacing scar from a run-in with The Starling, who bit his cheek), arrives to arrest Marius and Cosette. Fantine refuses to tell him where her parents are, but Jean-Luc is still bitter and spills the beans about their vacation. Even armed with this information, Clerons can’t catch Marius and Cosette—the Boulogne innkeeper, Gérard, gives them warning of a telegram ordering their detention—and Fantine enlists The Starling to help her family. He, of course, is more than willing.

Fighting erupts in the streets again. Marius is in the thick of it, and we are treated to a somewhat heroic moment in which he calls on the combatants not to shoot their fellow workingmen. He neglected, however, to tell them not to shoot him, and Marius is fatally wounded. Cosette, who didn’t stay indoors as she did in 1832, is hurt as well in the same fusillade that killed Marius.

The Starling has continued to carry messages, and so he is the one to tell Fantine about her parents’ fates. Marius’s body cannot be found, but Cosette has been taken to by Pajol to Verdier’s house (remember Pajol was the Gavroche clone who lived) where she is nursed by Verdier’s wife, Thérèse. She has nothing better to do because Verdier has been killed in the fighting. Jean-Luc, meanwhile, has been sequestered at Nicolette’s, where he goes whenever he needs to feel particularly sorry for himself. The Starling tells him that Marius is dead and Cosette is wounded, but suspecting that Jean-Luc would go to the authorities, he won’t tell him where Cosette is. Jean-Luc takes the news with petulance, saying "Oh God, if only they’d let themselves be arrested. She’d be whole. My father would be alive. This is your fault, Starling."

Once Cosette is feeling better, arrangements are made to sneak the family to England, with the aid of Mademe Carêne, their helpful cook. But, when everyone’s just about ready to get on the train, Jean-Luc arrives. Jean-Luc passionately wants to abort the flight to England and cut a deal with Clerons, whom he mysteriously trusts, despite his scary scar and general meanness. Finally Cosette refuses to go to England if Jean-Luc won’t (he won’t), so she and The Starling disembark, and Fantine continues on with Madame Carêne. What to do when you’re wanted by the feds, so to speak, and your family is torn asunder? Cosette knows! With the aid of Countess Crasseaux, the canny underworld denizen, she becomes a scrivener while The Starling grows up and becomes a workingman.

In the halls of government, gears are also in motion. Tired of the ease with which rebels can barricade streets and attack soldiers, Haussman’s designs are implemented, and Paris is transformed into a city with really wide roads and scary traffic circles. As time passes—there’s another interlude that dispatches several years in short order—Fantine, Jean-Luc, and Cosette exchange letters that keep us up-to-date with the plot. (Aunt Adelaide, by the way, dies. This has no impact whatsoever on the story, as it seems the only reason she is mentioned in the story at all is because she was in Les Misérables.)

As we return to the standard narrative, Jean-Luc has turned to high society. He gains entry through Zelma’s aid and wastes money, while in the background Zelma chortles. Denied the joy of ruining Cosette, she has turned her odious attention to the rest of the Pontmercy family. Jean-Luc, of course, is oblivious and, per usual, unpleasant and doesn’t visibly demur when Zelma reveals she knew Cosette when they were girls and says such things as "Your mother always was sly and treacherous."

All this maneuvering has been aimed at engineering a marriage between Jean-Luc and Eponine-Hortense—an arrangement that Jean-Luc eventually concedes to, even while he still loves Nicolette and even though if he had his druthers he would choose to marry her. Nicolette, for her part, doesn’t see marriage as at all desirable or necessary and is now a successful singer for Offenbach, just as she’s planned all along. When Jean-Luc’s marriage does come off, Cosette observes the nuptial carriage in the street and despairs of him.

Nicolette attends the wedding as well, and makes an interesting acquaintance when she visits Jean-Luc’s home while he and his bride on their honeymoon. There Nicolette finds a drunken Zelma, who is singing "Camptown Races"—it’s her favorite song and a constant reminder that hey! she has lived in America!—and in a mood to relate Cosette’s childhood history. "We fed her what the dogs wouldn’t eat," she gloats to Nicolette, who takes all this in and maintains that Jean-Luc still loves her. "He loves money," Zelma retorts and then happily declares, "I’m going to make him everything his mother despises." Nicolette retrieves her nude portrait (she thought Eponine-Hortense might not like it) and leaves.

Cosette, like Jean-Luc, is unchanged. We find that she has refused to let moss grow under her. While she has been living in poverty, eking out a living writing letters for the illiterate under the name "The Plumed Lark," she has created a masterpiece, a political pamphlet called "The Toad Napoleon." This reworking of a La Fontaine fable is a big hit among the people. Also, without intending to, Cosette makes things hard for Jean-Luc, as when the pamphlet was published, it carried La Lumière’s logo, which clever Clerons connects with Marius and Cosette. But though he skulks around the ragpickers’ neighborhood, Clerons comes up a day late and a dollar short in his hunt.

Cosette and the gang enjoy hiding out from Clerons and sneaking illegal presses around so much that she writes another pamphlet called "Bonapoléon," and Beaujard, the artist, agrees to sneak it to Belgium to be printed. In the midst of this new escapade, a teenager arrives at the Plumed Lark’s stand and asks for two letters—one to his father, and one to The Sparrow that indicates that he should visit the wineshop in the old Corinth and look behind a brick where "Vive le peuple!" is inscribed on the wall. Much excitement ensues because Cosette knows that it’s the spot where Marius hid a love letter to Cosette. But is it a trap? Only Clerons and Pajol are both still alive and also alumni of the barricade at the Corinth. Or are they?

Oh, this is sort of involved. Do you really want to know? Okay, the teenager and his father, a man named Grincourt, both worked as stonemasons at the fortress Ham. Through the walls, they struck up a friendship with one of the prisoners. This prisoner had heroically walked between the combatants in 1851, and moved by his bravery, the soldiers only injured him when they fired, which wasn’t so much of a favor, as he was badly cared for at a military hospital and then thrown in Ham to rot. At any rate, he can’t stand up right because his stomach was badly stitched. Yum!

Of course this prisoner is Marius, and of course Grincourt, who lives in Saint-Simon but apparently has the regional edition delivered, admires La Lumière. Once Cosette and The Starling arrive in Saint-Simon, hoping to discover Marius, this point of connection inspires Grincourt to help rescue Marius, who sneaks out dressed as a woman and scarpers off to Paris with Cosette. Once there they disappear into the barrière and quickly fill out the forms that will keep their phone number and address from being included in the phone book.

Now that we’re back in Paris, we can continue to wonder that anyone still cares about Jean-Luc. But Nicolette does! She knows he had a daughter (Louise) with Eponine-Hortense and wishes to meet Cosette, for whom she has a kind of fascination brought on by Jean-Luc’s description of his parents’ love: it’s as if the two of them were their own country, a sentiment we readers have heard often. On the occasion of this meeting in the Rue Montaigne we learn a lot about Nicolette. She confides to Cosette her real secret origins story, which is, in a nutshell, that she came from a poor family, ran away to Paris, became various unsavory things before finally making it into the theater, and is sad because she lost her brother who also ran away to Paris. She and Cosette also philosophize on Jean-Luc, and Nicolette describes Zelma’s bad influence, which Cosette takes in stride, as she has decided that Jean-Luc was already lost.

Because she likes her so much, and because it will keep Zelma from totally "winning," Nicolette gives Cosette a job as a dresser, which is none too soon, because Cosette has run out of her wedding pearls to pawn, and her scrivening business isn’t enough to support herself and the very sick and depressed Marius. One visit to the Countess Crasseux to acquire a disguise, and Cosette is Mea Culpa, the dresser. While getting her new costume, Cosette learns that—will wonders never cease?—the Countess knew her mother: she is the woman with whom Fantine roomed while she lived as a seamstress in Paris. Nothing else comes of this information, though. Just as Cosette is taking up her new identity, Clerons arrives, looking for the Plumed Lark, whom he suspects is Cosette, but that bird never returns to her booth in the slums. Still, despite Cosette’s new job, Marius remains seriously ill, destined not to do much else for the rest of the book, and Cosette, saddened, thinks often of Jean Valjean.

It is now time for Fantine the daughter to return to the story, and she does so, having made a name for herself in London as a simply divine, dahrling, French cook. Jean-Luc is horribly offended by his sister’s working-class status, but still, she lives with him and the rest of Zelma’s icky clan. And of course Fantine still loves The Starling, whom Jean-Luc still hates. Things are not well in this house, we learn, as Eponine-Hortense is "alternately capricious, cajoling, adoring, seductive, bitter, cutting, cruel, and violent"—that’s a lot for a girl to remember to be!—towards Jean-Luc, and both have affairs, Jean-Luc with apparently anything that moves, and Eponine-Hortense with Arsène (Jean-Luc’s friend, remember?). Apparently, Eponine-Hortense is mad about being in a loveless marriage, while Arsène marries Corinne, which hardly seems like a likely love-match either. Still more action takes place on the marriage front, as Jean-Luc tries merciless to bully Fantine into marrying, but naturally nothing comes of that.

Since no one had MySpace way back when, Cosette has no idea that Fantine is back in France, and Fantine has no idea where her mother is. This changes when Jean-Luc visits Nicolette backstage. "Mea Culpa" hides behind a clothing rack, hears the conversation, and in this way discovers Fantine has returned. Hold that thought, because they don’t meet for quite a while, though it’s strange that Nicolette doesn’t ask Fantine to visit her in her dressing room for a reunion.

In case you’re wondering about the peripheral characters, Cosette helps Pajol (who has wanted to kill Clerons for a long time and sometimes refers to it, leading us to know far in advance exactly what will happen to him) and his wife, Germaine, whenever possible, and they are still involved with printing pamphlets when the occasion arises. However, there’s not much else that they do. So don’t worry about them. We are now going to be interested in The Starling and Fantine.

Fantine visits an old café hangout, and the denizens recognize her. Mimi, The Starling’s aging prostitute mother takes Fantine to the Countess Crasseux, who takes an interest in arranging a meeting between the two. They meet—where else?—in the Luxembourg Gardens. They finally declare their love, but back at home Jean-Luc is livid that Fantine wants to marry The Starling. He produces documents for her to sign to the effect that he, Jean-Luc, has no obligation to help her or any children she might bear and that after they are wed, they will not live in Paris.

After this display of brotherly love, Fantine gets to meet The Starling in the basement—can you think of a case when someone else had to meet a young woman in the basement?—and The Starling declares that he can’t leave Paris because there are people there, like Cosette, who still need his help. Fantine understands, but they are interrupted—by hooves outside! It was a trap! Clerons and his soldiers burst into the room and he questions Fantine: "Mademoiselle Pontmercy, or should I say Madame Lascaux," he says wittily, using The Starling’s surname. "Say what you like, Monsieur Clerons, if it will make you any more appealing than you were when we last met," Fantine retorts. "You have not improved with age." Clerons survives the barb and asks after The Starling’s whereabouts, but Fantine isn’t telling. So Clerons sits down and tells Fantine about Jean Valjean and that Fantine’s namesake was a prostitute. Such delightful conversation! "Your heart pounds," Clerons observes. "Have I frightened you?" Finally he leaves, and Cosette’s heart is still pounding, which we are all much gratified to learn is because The Starling is hiding under her skirts, and, well, I’ll let Kalpakian treat you to Too Much Information, if you want (highlight to see):

"The ribbons at her throat and breast pounded more violently after the soldiers had left. Her fan dropped and her hand tensed upon the mantle, as Fantine held herself upright with some difficulty, flushed, her breath coming in quick, short bursts, eyes closed, as the vast white crinoline undulated, and at the wordless suggestion of her lover, she moved her feet apart, no longer silent, making now small involuntary noises, moist cries of freedom and ecstasy and fulfillment."

Despite the exciting interlude Clerons’s visit provided her, Fantine is furious about Jean-Luc’s betrayal, and she takes up Nicolette’s offer to visit her at her country house in Argenteuil (now that Nicolette is Offenbach’s woman, she is wealthy). The sad aspect of this is apparently Louise, Jean-Luc’s daughter, is not unpleasant, and she’s left home alone where, she observes, the residents "say terrible things about everyone." We don’t really hear from her again that I can recall. Sorry, Louise.

When Fantine arrives in Argenteuil she finds all manner of people at the house: Cosette, Marius, The Starling, and Nicolette. In this manner she learns her father is alive, sees Cosette for the first time in years, and generally is happy. After a short while, and the conclusion that she cannot marry because the official papers would reveal The Starling’s identity, and he is still a wanted man, the couple forms a free union, and presaging the 1960s, Marius and Cosette are understanding and supportive and get into tie-dyeing bandanas in their free time.

Nicolette, however, is not happy, because Jean-Luc is still a jerkwad and says nasty things to her when she reveals that she is pregnant by him. Though she contemplates suicide, she decides not to bother and instead declares that her relationship with Jean-Luc is finito and nothing he can say can make it not so (yes, that is a "Make it so Captain Picard joke). Nicolette feels a little better when Cosette gives her a biiiig hug, promises to care for the baby if anything happens to her, and tells her "You are my daughter even if you are not my child"—which, it is pointed out, is just like what Jean Valjean had told her years before. These similarities to Les Misérables are tricky: by their nature they have to be more or less obvious, so is it fair to complain? But, if they are executed in a clunky way, surely it’s not wrong to complain? Anyway...

It’s time for another pamphlet! This time it’s one called Tadpoléon, and you might guess to what that refers if I also mention that Nicolette’s sleeping with Louis-Napoleon is what inspired it. However, Cosette rues its publication, as Clerons, who is in deep doo-doo with an embarrassed emperor, rousts out Cosette’s ragpicker friends and generally makes himself a nuisance. Eventually he finds Nicolette’s name on a list of Louis-Napoleon’s nighttime guests and connects her to Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc is thrilled to receive him again, and even more thrilled when Clerons asks him if he knows that his mother is alive and living in Paris. Jean-Luc pleads ignorance, and says he hasn’t seen Fantine or The Starling since the day of Clerons’s failed ambush, and that he hasn’t seen Cosette at all. Clerons, still the elegant conversationalist, insults Jean-Luc with a jibe about the "convicts and whores" in his family and relates an incorrect version of Jean Valjean’s history—he says Jean Valjean was one of Fantine’s customers and that he stole his money and so on—and goes on to tell Jean-Luc about the illustrious parentage and grandparentage of Eponine-Hortense. Readers, meanwhile, try to remember how many times they have already had to hear rehashed Les Misérables plot.

Finally we get to some conversation that will advance the plot and get us closer to the end of the book. Clerons tells Jean-Luc that Nicolette betrayed Louis-Napoleon to La Lumière, but Jean-Luc is amazed because she was never interested in politics. Hm. Clerons asks about Nicolette’s servants, and Jean-Luc says they’re all long-time employees and that they travel with her always, and as he speaks, he realizes that Mea Culpa is Cosette. Foolishly he repeats "Mea Culpa" over and over, penetrating Clerons’s thick skull, and at long last triggering the final events in the book.

So, at the same time Nicolette is starring in a new satirical play. Though it mocks Louis-Napoleon as always seems the way with censors, it has slipped through the cracks, and it plays to packed houses. During the performance on the night of Jean-Luc’s (this time unwitting) betrayal, Clerons and his soldiers arrive, and Nicolette and Cosette flee to the dressing room. Jean-Luc is there, drunk, which is a practical state to be in for the denoument, and he calls Cosette a traitor, to which Cosette replies, "I’m rubber and you’re glue; anything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you." Jean-Luc turns to the by-now mainstay insult-Jean-Valjean gambit, and Cosette tells him "Jean Valjean the convict would have despised you." (Isn’t this great?) Jean-Luc bemoans that Cosette has ruined everything he’s worked for, and Nicolette helpfully observes that Jean-Luc has never worked for anything in his life. This is thankfully ended when Clerons arrives and unmasks (or unwigs) Cosette. Nicolette attacks him when he tries to grab Cosette, and in the melee a fire is started, Pajol (who’s now a stagehand) arrives and shoots Clerons (about time), and everyone flees as the theater burns. Well, enough of that.

The story, which has had the feeling of trickling out of events for the last two hundred pages or so, concludes in the year 1867 in Boulogne. Cosette and Marius live there and run the inn they once patronized. An adopted granddaughter, Valentina (she’s Nicolette’s daughter), frolics, and a stranger arrives. Hi, Jean-Luc! He tells Marius and Cosette that he’s on his way to England to try to see Nicolette. "Can’t you even speak to me?" he asks his silent parents. "Even the prodigal son got spoken to." "The prodigal son only abandoned his father," Cosette replies. "He did not betray him to the police." Zing! The upshot turns out to be that Marius forgives Jean-Luc because he, Marius, has always been trying to live up to Jean Valjean’s example. Cosette, daughter of Jean Valjean’s charity, for whose happiness he sacrificed everything, is silent. At last when Jean-Luc leaves she says, "You are my son and I wish you well. I can say that much now." "Maybe over time you can say more," replies Jean-Luc. "Over time and memory," Cosette says. Whatever that means. And, with that—a stunning "Oh, well" note—the book ends. Phew.

So much is the plot. Why not also indulge in a few generalizations?

Bad as I Wanna Be
Such language. Such fascination with references scatological. Tut tut. Actually, the naughty words aren’t so much shocking as they are like listening to a middle schooler swear. A sixth grader can learn to speak the words, but he’s merely aping someone else; he doesn’t say the words. Besides the lack of conviction and street cred (I mean, "I’ll steal your ass and you’ll have to shit through your ribs"?), there’s the additionally troubling result that in this case such gawky use ultimately demeans the subject matter. The thing about language—or characterization, or plot events, or any number of other things—is that once a certain meanness, in the sense of smallness, of spirit begins to filter into the story, the Les-Misérables-ness evaporates. Rail as one might against Hugo’s excesses or personal hypocrisies, but nothing in his book works to diminish its bigness of spirit. Maybe taking himself entirely too seriously was his secret success despite egotistical flair. Who knows?

Written into a Corner
I have a sneaking suspicion that Kalpakian didn’t enjoy writing this book. What can be said about the quality of the writing in and of itself—the structure of the sentences, the turns of phrase, the je ne sais quoi of words—is that it’s dutiful. Usually the writing is plain, uninspired, and uninteresting, giving a sense that its main objective was to merely communicate the events of a plot outline. Florid writing, stylized writing, or writing that fails on some other grounds would have been more entertaining than plain, unimaginative, utilitarian prose. In a few cases it lapses to revel a certain lack of thought, to wit (my favorite example): a character "facing certain death or perpetual imprisonment as a repeat offender." Certain death or something else? It’s one of those puzzling fourth dimensions created by illogic.

Who Is Our Tour Guide on This Wondrous Long Journey?
Kalpakian herself confuses me. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction (1990), was a writer-in-residence at the University of Washington (I assume that indicates a level of seriousness), and has had multiple non-sequel, non-commission books published before and after Cosette. Is she for real? Are the other books better? What up, yo? Maybe she just wanted the check, in which case should someone be blamed for wanting money in the bank? Beats me, but with this summary over, I won’t be reading the book again.

Top Billing: French History
French history plays a major role in Cosette. It’s practically a character in the book. On the one hand, good for Kalpakian for incorporating it. On the other, Americans just don’t know that much about French history, the ins and outs, the specific platforms that opposing groups had during times of revolution, the issues at play, and the personalities involved. But it would make the book better if you did know about it. Marius and Cosette seem to be fighting always for the workers and truth and justice and all things bright and good, and you get an idea of what is going on, but there’s just too much. The characters bob along on the surface of the current of history, but they are often overwhelmed by it. Too many passages about revolutionary sentiment or political opinion, given in broad strokes without sufficient detail anchoring them in the characters’ stories, bog the book down, and lacking specific knowledge of events, the effect is the same as if an artist emptied all his little tubes of paint into one pile and tried to draw a kaleidoscopic image with them. It’s all...brown. You think there might be something interesting there, but it’s all too mixed up. Add to this that I had a difficult time caring much about the characters, so keeping the history straight wasn’t worth it. So, whether you believe it’s my job to be interested in the characters or the author’s job to make me interested, the integration of historical material and character-based narrative unfortunately it doesn’t work well here.

Ain’t No One Worthy of Valjean
Always my beef, in any adaptation or sequel, is R-E-S-P-E-C-T for Jean Valjean. No one in Cosette really carries his torch; no one really makes his efforts worth it. I do, however, give Kalpakian credit for trying in the cases of Marius and Cosette, who slog away at what they think is right. She beats Cesera there. But, still, all it amounts to is trying. Mainly this is because Marius and Cosette's political struggles and their emotional ones are not well integrated (they have difficulties, but do they ever doubt their politics or question the sacrifices they make? how does their activism affect their inner lives?), and their struggles, such as Cosette’s hard times as a scrivener, come off as superficial or clichéd. It’s not very satisfying, which I attribute to weakness in the writing. The problem is especially exacerbated because Marius ceases to do anything aside from ail after about a third of the way into the book. And double especially since most of the focus seems to be on documenting the failure of Jean-Luc to be a decent human being, and then in a deus ex machina-esque moment he arrives in the last four pages of the book and feels contrite. What brought that on? What went on in his head? Anything interesting? So why bother with a sequel all about how Marius and Cosette’s son more or less sucks?

The End
Well, that was Cosette. Or as much as I can piece together or think to comment on. It’s not really worth any excoriations leveled at it, I found. Why? It simply isn’t interesting enough to be worthy of any strong feeling. Cosette lacks emotional depth—a certain gravitas, a solemnity of purpose appropriate to this sort of Les Misérables-related work. It lacks characters that feel fresh and lively. It lacks, to be French, élan. And so, reading it lacks these things as well. As a family saga, it suffices, barely. In fact, had the characters been given different names, had some details changed, and had the writing been lively, I wonder if it might be more than vaguely passable. As a historical drama, it fails to believably create an enveloping sense of another time; this seems mainly to stem from a failure to use interesting period detail and the use of modern syntax that leans more toward limp romance-novel prose than anything else. As a serious novel or as a serious follow-up to Les Misérables, it’s hard to see how it can do anything but disappoint.