As in The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' documentary of the French Occupation, the novel's barrage of impressions and opinions assaults, even implicates, the reader. Derisive voices chant an anti-Vichy song. A housewife prepares makeshift tea out of water and carrot tops. The odor of filth rises from the streets. Meanwhile, the heated voices of a cautious bourgeois and a young radical debate questions that offer no moral answers.
DESPITE ITS energetic style, however, Cat's Grin has some problems of structure and voice. Perhaps because of his background as a journalist, Maspero feels compelled to tell all. Jarringly, he departs from Cat's limited point of view to give the reader information which the thirteen-year-old could not possibly perceive.
He traces Cat's every moment--the sparsely narrated action scenes of the book are interrupted by long sections during which Maspero has Cat meditate on what he has learned and who he has become. None of these sections quite rings true--they are too pat and preachy, as in Cat's huffy rejection of the pallid values of his aunt and uncle:
What they say about him does not matter....He knows that the things tht really deserve to be fought for exist, he will spend his whole life finding them and defending them if he has to. He is sure Antoine would agree.
The mediocre translation by Nancy Amphoux does not curb the book's tendency to ramble. Nevertheless Cat's Grin is an evocative novel about a time in history which many French would prefer to forget.
Maspero introduces the book with a quotation from Alice in Wonderland, in which the Cheshire Cat vanishes except for his grin. In the same way, Cat grins on, even as his hope for his family dwindles and he remains alone and cynical, keeping up the empty pretense of being a child.
As he continues to grin, to fool those who watch him, his substance disintegrates and melts away. As Alice exclaims, "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin...but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I've ever seen in my life!"