Hounds of Love

It seems a bit unfair, but Irène Némirovsky's fiction rarely gets the chance to speak for itself: the author's own story casts an unusually long shadow over her writing. Then again, without Némirovsky's biography, her novels, first published in France 70 years ago, would almost certainly never have made it into English at all.

Interest in her back catalogue stems from the recent success of Suite Française, two novellas detailing life in the Nazi-occupied Paris of 1940 and 1941, the manuscript of which was not discovered until the 1990s. Long-lost records of history are always more romantic than the neatly filed, well-documented kind. In addition, Némirovsky, a Jewish immigrant from Kiev, must have been writing her considered, reflective description of the chaos more or less as it happened; in 1942 she was sent to Auschwitz, where she died after a few weeks.

As a result of the sensation caused by Suite Française, Némirovsky's other books are now appearing in English. The Dogs and the Wolves is the latest volume to get the treatment. Its protagonists are the Sinner children Ada, Ben and Harry, who flee Ukraine for Paris with their parents after a pogrom rips through their home town. The Sinner family has two distinct branches: Harry is part of a wealthy banking dynasty, while Ada and her cousin Ben are the children of maklers, traders who scrape a living buying and selling whatever they can lay their hands on. Once in Paris, Ada and Ben settle into an existence as hand-to-mouth as life ever was in the Russian empire; meanwhile, the wealthy Sinners are grudgingly accepted into the Paris haute bourgeoisie.

While Ben grows from a competitive boy into a man hungry for the sort of wealth into which Harry was born, Ada cultivates a longing for Harry himself. As a child, she spies him near his home. Expensive clothes apart, "his resemblance to Ben was so striking: the same black curls, fine nose, long, delicate neck . . . the same wide eyes, simultaneously bright and misty, like a light burning in oil". She is still besotted when she meets him in Paris years later. By then, Ada and Ben have married each other - she for practical reasons, he for love - and Harry has a wealthy Parisian wife. When he buys two paintings Ada has made of their home town, however, their relationship changes.

Ben, racked with envy and "longing for success", becomes embroiled in the Sinners' bank dealings, encouraging Harry's relatives to start "pulling off deals quickly, audaciously, snapping up millions overnight and using the money to speculate again". Sound familiar? Inevitably the outcome is not good - for the bank, for Ben, for Harry and for Ada.

Where the banking motif is almost weirdly modern, the "endless love" is at times quite syrupy. And although Némirovsky's contemplative, highly descriptive writing style is often beautiful, it occasionally drags into long-windedness. There is something less romantic bubbling beneath the novel's surface, however: the author's acidic view of class and Jewish society of the period.

Money is really the only distinguishing factor between the maklers and the "rich Jews" - the dogs and wolves of the novel's title. Némirovsky, herself a banker's daughter, notes sharply how hard the wealthy work "to send a message to other Jews: to show that they were worth more". That sentiment pollutes all of the characters' lives. Harry's looks are striking, for example, while Ben's are plain ugly. And, in their different ways, Ben and Ada both crave a place on the upper rungs of society. "What you call success, victory, love, hatred, I call money," Ben tells Harry. Although Ada is apparently less concerned with wealth, her romantic dreams are tinged with financial ambition. She yearns for "a kind of life that is not just work and longing" - something Harry can afford to offer, but Ben cannot.

With a few exceptions, the characters in The Dogs and the Wolves are hungrily acquisitive. In this respect, Némirovsky's use of Jewish stereotypes is uncomfortable; indeed, she has attracted posthumous accusations of being a "self-hating" Jew. Ultimately, however, she lays the blame for her characters' avarice on the treatment they have received: "Have I ever known anything but hatred?" asks Harry's bank-owning uncle Salomon.

Stereotyping aside, as an analysis of how money and ambition can divide any group of people, The Dogs and the Wolves is sharp-eyed, sour and completely engrossing.

Alyssa McDonald is assistant editor of the New Statesman.

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