The meaning of the novel’s title refers to a man who philanders, who peels off the petals / leaves of the artichoke, nibbles the meaty base and throws them away when finished. Each petal is a woman that he conquers, enjoys briefly, and throws in the garbage. As he goes through life he leaves a trail of broken hearts who are disposed of in his waste can. Eventually without its petals, he is left only with just the heart, his heart, just memories of his victims. In short a duplicitous scoundrel, a womanizer. But as the metaphor continues relentlessly to its end, his comeuppance in operatic fashion, he ends up himself without petals in the trash bin.

The tale begins with a rebellious, Francophile, American woman married with children vacationing in Southern France who decides not to go home with her husband to help his failing business a casualty of the Wall Street Crash. Living off a trust fund, she plans to stay in France, perhaps forever. Becoming infatuated with a totally charming Frenchman, a man who is already having an affair with a beautiful widow far below him in socioecomomic status. She is pregnant, but he is becoming engaged to a third woman with wealth and status. He, a strong, handsome and witty man, easily conquers this naïve American woman proud of her beauty and shapely body even after having two children. She is an easy mark because of her unabashed love affair with France and its culture and her reckless attitude toward her tiresome husband and boring marriage. As the affair deepens, she decides to ‘run off’ with this charmer, totally, head-over-heels in love.

But when she is about to make her move, the charmer disappears throwing her into a deep depression. Agonizing over the untimely death of his newborn son, he avoids his ‘deflowered’ American, one of his artichoke petals. Alarmed, the woman’s maid wires a ‘come-here-quick’ note to the cuckolded husband in the US. When he arrives, he seems the skeleton of his ‘liberated’ wife, a discarded artichoke petal, draw, vacant, sullen who he magnanimously tries to nurse back to health aided by a quick trip to Italy.

On their way back to America, nearly recovered from her depression, a sudden, tragic series of events explode as the novel comes to a tumultuous end.

Written in 1933 the author skillfully traces the mental changes of the female protagonist, gives intimate details of the affair, masterfully describes the charming social and physical milieu of day-to-day life of Southern France just prior to World War II. A page turner, one of several novels by an as yet unknown author with consummate writing ability.