Left and Right Banks
While Lamar’s essay “French Impressionism” in the collection Black France/France Noire highlights the benefits of a perceived racial impartiality in Paris from an African-American man’s perspective, Lamar’s first novel set in Paris (and fourth novel in general), Rendezvous Eighteenth, highlights the visibility of African-descended people in Paris and also portrays the partiality given to African-Americans in Paris. The title Rendezvous Eighteenth captures Lamar’s focus on the Eighteenth Arrondissement (one of the twenty subsections of Paris). This subsection of Paris is located in the northernmost part of the city, which has a large North and Sub-Saharan African population. The Eighteenth has areas frequented by tourists, particularly Montmartre, where the Sacré Cœur is located, but some other areas of the Eighteenth are not as well known, especially in 2003, when the novel was first published.
Lamar highlights the well-known and less-traveled areas of the Eighteenth in this novel. In a 2009 interview, Lamar remarked, "I felt that American writers and American writers that are my friends don’t know the Paris I know, and they write about a Paris that is much more a part of this part of town [Sixth Arrondissement]. And I really wanted to show a different side of Paris. And that was very much on my mind in Rendezvous Eighteenth” (Lamar, “Café”). Lamar shows this “different side of Paris” through his third-person narrator’s descriptions of the city, the visibility of people of African descent, and the experiences of his protagonist, Ricky Jenks.
