The Lonely Americans

"He is her witness. I will never be able to take this, his witnessing, away from him. I will always be one level removed, attaching images to shadows. Every sound is an echo. Here I am, in the echo chamber. The door is locked. The walls are thin and aerated. Every smell reaches me, every touch brushes against my skin. Where do they end and I begin? Yes, that is the question: where do I begin."When Adam moves to Rennes, France to oversee a merger, he soon finds that his neighbor, Paul Rothrock, is also a twenty-five-year-old American. When it comes to romance, Adam and Paul have very different styles. Adam is attracted to the hookup culture that he finds on Tinder, while Paul falls hopelessly in love with a French woman named Inès. Throughout the novel, the story of Paul and Inès' love affair is filtered through the auralistic voice of the narrator, who can hear every sound in Paul's apartment through his bedroom wall.