If Only It Were True

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From Publishers Weekly This is the book, by a French architect based in San Francisco, that made a huge Hollywood deal, and then a seven-figure sale to Pocket Books. It's an interesting study in the difference between a movie concept and a novel. One can imagine it as an offbeat romantic comedy on the screen, with charismatic actors and some nifty special effects, but as a book it's slight and one-dimensional--and it doesn't help that Levy has no ear whatsoever for American speech patterns. The gimmick at the heart of the story is a mixture of the movie notion of "meeting cute" and the Invisible Man tradition. Arthur, a young architect in San Francisco, finds a beautiful girl hiding in the closet of an apartment he has just bought. The problem is, only he can see her; she is, in fact, a spirit emanation of Lauren, a nurse who is lying in a coma at a nearby hospital after a near-fatal accident; the apartment used to be hers. After initially rejecting her explanation, Arthur begins to fall for Lauren, and determines that he must remove her comatose body from the hospital before her grieving mother can bring herself to cut off her life support. Helped by his skeptical business partner, Arthur accomplishes this with a borrowed ambulance and Lauren's knowledge of how the hospital works. Then the "body," along with the attendant invisible Lauren, is spirited away to the Carmel hideaway Arthur has kept since his beloved mother's death from cancer. (Life with mother is rendered in a series of saccharine scenes that would embarrass a maker of life insurance commercials.) George Pilger, one of the most improbable American police inspector ever to grace the pages of a novel, gets onto Arthur's escapade and goes down to Carmel to confront him. Will Arthur be arrested? Will Lauren die? In a gentle fable like this, there can be no real surprises. What is surprising is that so slender a tale, which actually reads more like a draft of a screenplay, should have appeared as an (almost) full-length book. (May) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal YA-First-time novelist Levy scored a bestseller with this book in his native France. It is a light, frothy tale of love conquering all, even a coma. Lauren Kline, a medical resident at San Francisco Memorial Hospital, is young, beautiful, and content with her life. Then a faulty steering mechanism in her old clunker of a car causes her to suffer head injuries in a shattering car accident. As she later explains, she could hear everything around her in the hospital recovery room, but could neither move, see, nor speak. She learns that she is languishing in a coma, having somehow survived being pronounced dead. Enter Arthur, an architect and partner in a restoration firm, who recently moved into an apartment and finds it comes equipped with an unexpected bonus-Lauren. Well, her spirit, anyway, since her body continues to reside in the very hospital in which she worked. She's not dead, so the apartment-dwelling Lauren is not actually a ghost, and she seems to have form and substance, but only Arthur can see and hear her. Readers learn that for months she has been psychically transporting her spirit all over the city until she finally comes back to her own apartment-now Arthur's. This feel-good story is an easy and engrossing read, and it should be particularly popular with teen girls. Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Arthur returns home to find a lovely young woman--whose body lies comatose in a hospital far away. Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks bought the rights. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist First-time French author Levy has managed to make the improbable seem possible. Lauren, a medical student at a San Francisco hospital, ends up in a coma after a car crash. Several months later Arthur, an architect, finds Lauren in the closet of his new apartment. She explains that this is her apartment and that she is sort of a ghost: her body is in the hospital and she has become separated from it. Lauren is as shocked as Arthur, who, after checking out her story, decides to take a leave from work so he can help her. They start to fall in love, and when Lauren's mother decides to take out her feeding tube, Arthur is forced to take action. With well-developed characters and a heartfelt journey into life's lessons, Levy creates an original love story that will appeal to fans of Nicholas Sparks and James Michael Pratt. And the movie rights have been sold to DreamWorks. Patty Engelmann Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved From Kirkus Reviews First novel, a bestseller in France at 160,000 copies: a variation on the love-after-death story that made the film Ghost so popular. ER intern Lauren Kline has a road accident, her old Triumph skidding on rain-greasy asphalt, and winds up back at her own San Francisco hospital in what looks like an irreversible grade-four coma. She lies abed for six months before her detached spirit, visiting the old apartment kept up by her mother, meets its new tenant. Arthur, an architect who has just been sent packing by his girlfriend, opens a closet one day, and finds Lauren’s spirit just sitting there. She’s been wandering around for the past half year, and she’s quite lonely because no one sees her. But Arthur does; he can even touch her. Gosh, what could possibly happen after this meet-cute? Well, it does. Arthur and Lauren become lovers in romantic San Francisco. But Arthur’s best friend, Paul, thinks his buddy is bonkers, especially when he gets roped into helping Arthur kidnap Lauren’s body from the hospital when her mother decides to pull the plug and let her die. (Presumably, this would not be good for Lauren’s new love-life.) The story's best scene is the hospital kidnapping, with Arthur in a doctor’s jacket being called to help out a dying diabetic. The rest, set on Carmel’s oceanside, is flower-strewn, lyrical, and immensely predictable. Levy’s prose is no better than his plotting: his informational sentences display almost no sense of the urgencies of language or strivings for expression. What can you say when French rationalists take this pancake-batter to heart? Will moviemad, dough-brained Americans do likewise? Projected gross: $$$.Film rights to DreamWorks; author tour -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. About the Author Marc Levy lived in San Francisco for six years before returning to France to run an architectural firm. He divides his time between America and Europe. Just Like Heaven is his first novel and was an instant #1 bestseller in his homeland. Foreign rights have been sold in twenty-eight countries. Read more