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It's somewhat ironic that a barely literate Austrian archduchess with a bare-bones education and the attention span of a hamster has inspired a royal abundance of books.
Yet if you read one book about Marie Antoinette (also the subject of a movie starring Kirsten Dunst this fall), let it be Sena Jeter Naslund's gripping, gabby and beautifully poignant novel about the French queen's brief reign and bloody end.
Lady Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette: The Journey, an earlier non-fiction look at the queen's weirdly cloistered life, drowned in historical details and those long, unpronounceable French royal titles.
But Jeter Naslund (Ahab's Wife) rips away most of the courtly minutiae to focus instead on the woman behind those massive pompadours and heavy makeup.
Her "Toinette" is a sweet, clueless and charming girl in way, way over her head and trying to make the best of a difficult situation that would challenge Dr. Phil.
She's married, at 14, to a 15-year-old king who rebuffs her sexually, ignores her socially and prefers to spend his free time making keys. Yes, keys.
So she whiles away all those hours at Versailles with shopping sprees, gossip and marathon gambling sessions.
Both France and her Austrian mother pressure her to somehow produce an heir to the throne, despite the biological impossibility of pregnancy without sex.
If you strip away all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Marie Antoinette's life, what remains is an intimate story of a lost little rich girl trying to find her way in a world over which she has no control.
Marie Antoinette doesn't grow up or show true dignity until the end, when it's far too late for her to save herself.
Jeter Naslund's writing is sumptuous and personal, and she manages to make that most remote of subjects -- an 18th-century French queen -- relatable to modern times.
You know how her story ends. But the journey is so abundant with joy, grief and all those ordinary events that make up our lives, you'll lose your head reading about it.
Abundance: A Novel
of Marie Antoinette
By Sena Jeter Naslund
William Morrow, 542 pp., $26.95
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