Houseboat on the Seine

William Wharton's second memoir and tenth book is a delightful, often hilarious saga of the misadventures of an American artist in Paris dealing with a houseboat that refuses to stay afloat.

From the title, William Wharton's Houseboat on the Seine sounds like it may be a river-bound version of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. Not exactly. Before he published his first novel, Birdy, Wharton was a painter and schoolteacher living in Paris. Bad judgment prevailed when he was offered the chance to buy a hulk of a houseboat that had once been the property of an Arctic explorer. Wharton said yes, and soon after, the houseboat sank. Most of the book recounts Wharton's two-decade long effort to first re-float and then rebuild the decrepit vessel.