New York City is a recurring setting where the novel tests the promise of reinvention against the pressures of family, intimacy, and social identity. For Claire Farel it is part of an early passage into academic and political life; for Mila Wizman it becomes associated with religious restriction and flight; and for Alexandre Farel it later supplies the backdrop to a conspicuous entrepreneurial success. The city is not a single refuge or threat: its meaning changes with the person arriving, the relationships left behind, and the forms of freedom available to them.

Academic and Professional Beginnings

Claire Farel lived in the United States with her father and later studied at Columbia University in New York City. After her father died when she was thirteen, she returned to France to live with her mother. Years later, following studies at the École normale supérieure, Claire went back to New York City to join Columbia’s philosophy department. There she reconnected with her father’s former acquaintances, whose help enabled her to obtain an internship at the White House in Washington.

That American trajectory brought Claire into contact with Jean Farel. She met the celebrated French political journalist at a dinner in Washington organized by mutual friends. Twenty-seven years older than Claire and at the height of his media fame, Jean became her husband after she abandoned a possible career in American public administration and returned to France. New York City thus belongs to the story of Claire’s own intellectual and professional formation, but it also marks a route that she ultimately left for a marriage whose age difference and protective authority shaped her position for years.

A New Household and a Family’s Displacement

Much later, New York City becomes the destination to which Adam Wizman’s former wife moves with their daughters, settling in Crown Heights, a neighborhood described as intensely religious. Adam does not oppose the move. He prefers the girls to be far away, and Claire, who has no wish to share the ordinary care of Adam’s daughters week by week, is relieved as well. Their new life together has drawn them into an inward-looking romance: they turn down invitations, retreat from their friends, and for a time treat their shared intimacy as sufficient.

The move makes that retreat consequential. Mila, Adam’s older daughter, arrives at Claire and Adam’s home with a suitcase after finding life in New York City intolerable. She describes pressure over how she dresses, walks, and thinks. Her mother requires increasingly long skirts and black stockings regardless of the season; shops in the neighborhood sell goods conforming to Jewish law, and even toy stores divide their offerings into kitchen sets for girls and prayer kits for boys. When her mother says that, at eighteen, Mila is old enough to marry and considers asking the community rabbi to introduce her to a potential husband, Mila decides to return to France. She is legally an adult, preparing for her baccalaureate as an independent candidate, and Adam tells her she can live with him.

For Mila, then, New York City is not simply a place she leaves. It represents the increasingly constricted life from which she escapes: religious observance organized through everyday rules, gendered expectations, and a proposed marriage. Her flight brings her into the Paris household created by Claire and Adam’s separation from their former families. The cost of Mila’s escape is a new, uneasy domestic arrangement. Claire tolerates her presence without seeking an emotional bond, while Mila spends much of her time watching American television series and old films. New York City remains present in that Paris apartment as the place that has displaced Mila and unsettled the lovers’ attempt to build a private world apart from their families.

The City as a Test of Blended Intimacy

Mila’s return from New York City changes the character of Claire and Adam’s household. Their early passion had encouraged them to imagine a life devoted to one another, even as both withdrew from friends and family. Claire had no intention of taking on the routine of Adam’s daughters, and Adam offered little resistance when his former wife moved them abroad. Mila’s arrival reverses the arrangement: the consequences of their romance now occupy the home they share.

The contrast is especially clear when Alexandre Farel visits. In a compact apartment with two bedrooms, Mila has a large room overlooking a garden, alone when her sister is away and sharing it when she visits Paris. The adults’ domestic life is materially modest, but the emotional arrangement is anything but settled. Claire tries to manufacture a connection between the young people by proposing that Alexandre bring Mila to a party. Adam says that Mila will spend the night with her mother, who is visiting Paris from New York City; Mila refuses to attend a religious wedding because men and women will be separated, and jokes that she has told her mother that Adam will escort her home if she goes out.

The invitation exposes how little control Alexandre feels over the household’s decisions. He accepts politely, though he does not want to take Mila, and reads his mother’s effort to bring them together as another decision made on his behalf. Before leaving, he looks at photographs displayed among the books: Claire and Adam kissing in a car, and images of Mila and her sister. There is no photograph of him. The family picture he sees makes visible his sense of exclusion from a home assembled by adults who have reorganized their lives around their own love.

Entrepreneurial Reinvention in Manhattan

New York City reappears near the novel’s end as the setting for Alexandre’s public success. At twenty-six, he is one of the founders of Loving, an emotional-intelligence start-up that has raised five million dollars. Its application uses artificial intelligence to let users form friendly or romantic relationships with a customizable virtual correspondent, promising conversation that resembles interaction with a real person and affection without risk or harm. Alexandre introduces the company to investors by quoting Dickens and frames his own past, in the familiar entrepreneurial mode, as a difficult period after a breakup in which he lost confidence in himself and in other people. He says he conceived the project during the few weeks he spent in prison, when loneliness and isolation left him unable to communicate with anyone.

The success is strikingly concrete: within weeks, hundreds of thousands of Americans have used Loving, and the company is preparing to enter the European market. Alexandre thanks his absent parents and presents artificial intelligence as a force that could alter human relationships. Yet his own next actions complicate the promise of safe, controlled intimacy. In Manhattan, he stays for a limited period in an investor’s glass-fronted apartment near Chelsea, swims alone in the building’s pool, then uses another application designed to record informed sexual consent in an encrypted contract. He abandons one proposed encounter because the woman’s preferences do not permit explicit language, then approaches another woman, whose agreement includes practices he had not expected to be accepted.

The movement from Mila’s New York City to Alexandre’s Manhattan is not a simple progression from confinement to freedom. In one strand, a young woman leaves a community whose rules govern clothing, thought, and marriage; in another, a young man builds a business around simulated affection and tries to manage sex through advance specification. The city accommodates both escape and engineered control. Its recurring presence sharpens the novel’s question of whether human connection can be made safe by leaving, withdrawing, or designing rules around it—or whether the people involved remain entangled in consequences those strategies cannot contain.