Elegant and cosmopolitan, Ann Charney’s Rousseau’s Garden, is a novel of mid-life preoccupations. Claire, a Montreal photographer, has recently married Adrian, an art historian, their tasteful match cemented by a close physical relationship. But if life is so sublime, why is Claire in the grip of anxiety attacks? She believes her malaise may be inherited from her mother, Dolly, a sculptor, who became deeply distressed shortly before her early death. When Adrian goes to Paris to research French gardens, Claire takes the opportunity to delve into her mother’s past there. A touchstone on her quest is a book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinker, lover of gardens, and Dolly’s “spiritual guide.”

As Claire works to uncover the mystery of her mother’s decline, she is distracted by other matters: a suicide, a scandal involving Adrian’s best friend and a student, a crisis in her own marriage as she and Adrian weigh the pleasures of adult companionship against her desire for a child. There are also minor frictions: crotchety older friends, tardiness, an unpleasantness at a dinner party. The glimpses Charney gives us into other people’s lives reveal that, however unblemished they may appear, none is without anguish.

The settings are wonderfully evoked, from the baths in the Paris Oriental Quarter to a decrepit chateau outside the city. Charney’s writing is thoughtful and meticulously observed, yet several stylistic tics keep the reader at a distance: her repetition of names where pronouns would do, her tendency to pull back from the action to inform readers of essential plot information. And while we come to know Claire well, Adrian remains on the periphery, engrossed in his own concerns. Meanwhile, Charney tells us more than we really need to know about too many less important characters. Rousseau’s Garden is rather like life, actually – only nicer, because it’s Paris and the food is superb.