Choice Review
Marcus's expansive literary analysis relates novels by Balzac and Zola and popular writings of London and Paris to the transformations of public and private space embodied in 19th-century apartments. Paris, where such built forms shaped bourgeois living, provides the primary analytic axis for evocative links between architecture and urban media, gender roles and society. London, where single family homes predominated (albeit subdivided for lodgers), poses a pivotal contrast that Marcus creatively explores through the unease of haunted house tales. This section also artfully clarifies contrasts between the Paris of the 1840s that celebrated the apartment and the interiorization the author finds in Zola's post-Haussman Pot Bouille. Marcus carefully synthesizes a vast range of urban cultural materials, although one might still seek more detail about political economics and architectural history. One also sometimes misses a sense of apartments themselves as complex, changeable places of living, sleeping, eating, and so on. Nevertheless, the contrast of Paris and London underscores rich potential comparison with transformations of New York, Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona, and other domesticities and cityscapes. The work's insights should prove provocative especially to students in humanities familiar with its specialized critical vocabulary. Upper-division undergraduates and above. G. W. McDonogh Bryn Mawr College