Your Guide
Ricky, on the brink of 39, knew he was considered a bit of a fuckup. Back in America, anyway. But Ricky, despite all his ostensible privileges, felt he'd been dealt a pretty weak hand in life. He figured he had made the best of the raw human material he had to work with. Ricky Jenks was not a proud man, nor did he suffer from self-pity. Yet he always found it somehow fitting that the place where he felt most at home in this world was called Street of the Martyrs. (Rendezvous Eighteenth, 4)
Rendezvous Eighteenth is a third-person narrative that maps Ricky Jenks’s motivations and movement, predominately in Paris’s Eighteenth Arrondissement. Ricky Jenks is an African-American expatriate who moves to Paris’s Eighteenth after his fiancée leaves him at the altar to begin a love affair with Ricky’s successful cousin Dr. Cassius “Cash” Washington. In Paris, Ricky lives an unattached life. His interfaith relationship with his girlfriend is not secure because he is not Muslim. His employment status is not official, for he is without a permit to work in France. Ricky’s life becomes more unsettling when he is hired by Cash to find Cash’s wife, Serena. Ricky encounters Serena in popular and in less touristy areas of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. In searching for Cash’s wife, Ricky finds the courage to propose to Fatima, the love of his life.
With the narrator of Rendezvous Eighteenth as your guide, you will journey through a "different side of Paris" that increases the visibility of people of African descent and focuses on the experiences of the protagonist Ricky Jenks. This journey through Paris is so replete with literary geo-tagging that Entrée to Black Paris offers a Rendezvous Eighteenth tour that guides tourists to “the many quarters where his [Lamar's] protagonist, Ricky Jenks, deals with the trials and tribulations of life and love in Paris.” Lamar's third-person narrator’s chronicling of Ricky Jenks’s routes of love and suspense in Paris Noir is worthy of attention.
