“London was never even on my radar,” Gavin McCrea tells me on Zoom. “You know, it was always Paris. I was going to live in Paris.”
This desire provided the setting of his new epistolary novel Rousseau’s Lost Children, where a middle-aged Irish academic named Gavin Mulvany writes in 2022-23 to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau who responds in 1777-78. Gavin winds up accompanying Rousseau on his Paris walks. With maps of the routes they take and atmospheric descriptions of the various arrondissements, the book provides full immersion for anyone who has yet to take the Paris plunge.
McCrea himself is one such person. “On both of the occasions that I tried to move to Paris, I totally…