END OF THE WORLD HOUSE

Best friends take a trip to Paris, where they relive the same mysterious day again and again.

The whole world is going to hell. Gas is $10 a gallon. Most countries have closed their borders and enacted media blackouts due to civil unrest, bombings (“the nouveau Blitz”) and collapsed economies. “No one would call it a world war,” the novel tells us, “but that was semantics.” During a cease-fire, Californian best friends and early-30-somethings Kate and Bertie decide to take a trip to Paris, taking advantage of cheap prices designed to attract travelers not too skittish to venture abroad. At a bar, Kate and Bertie meet a Frenchman who promises a private tour of the Louvre, so the women arrive only to become separated in the museum—over and over again. Bertie, the corporate illustrator from whose close third-person perspective the novel is told, keeps waking up and reliving the trip to the Louvre with only the vaguest subconscious sense of déjà vu each time. But one day, it isn’t Kate whom Bertie meanders the empty museum with, but Dylan, a man who seems to know a great deal about what’s going on with time and where Kate might have disappeared to. When he begins to clue Bertie in, she realizes that the mystery goes deeper than she ever could have imagined. Celt’s decision to use a near apocalypse as the setting never fully makes sense; likewise, the logic behind the time loop remains just beyond full comprehension. The result is a novel whose picture never comes clear, like the photos Bertie takes as time slips around her. But as an allegory of friendship and the way adult relationships complicate the friendships we try to keep alive from youth, Celt’s story is truehearted and affecting.

A muddled but moving novel.