Hedgehogs aren't native to America, but you don't have to be French to sniff out at least some of the contradictions in the title of Muriel Barbery's European bestseller. Her novel both depicts and hopes to appeal to the connoisseur of humanity who can appreciate exquisite qualities unacknowledged by others. One of her two Parisian diarist heroines is a concierge, the other a suicidal adolescent. They sound conventional, but that's precisely the point: they both work very hard to achieve stereotypicality. As the frumpy concierge Renée says, "I correspond so very well to what social prejudice has collectively construed to be a typical French concierge that I am one of the multiple cogs that make the great universal illusion turn, the illusion according to which life has a meaning that can be easily deciphered." From her position as a teenager, Paloma casts a jaundiced eye: "In our world...you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult,...it is wobbly and ephemeral, so fragile, cloaking despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe."

Renée appears to be a prickly, homely hedgehog, but that appearance is a deliberately crafted façade masking her inner elegance of taste and sensibility. Her life's work has been to appear the perfect cat-owning, cabbage-stewing, television-blaring concierge so that she can really spend her time reading philosophy, cooking delicious morsels, critiquing grammatical solecisms, and watching the old Japanese movies of Yasujiro Ozu. Rather charmingly, she also likes Blade Runner. Every now and then in her interchanges with the tenants her mask slips -- she refers, say, to a relatively obscure work by Marx and Engels -- but, as she caustically notes, the privileged tenants' conditioning conspires to conceal her: "I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken." Her waspishness can take on the overtones of Diogenes, revealing dishonesty and inauthenticity in unexpected corners:

Colombe Josse is...a sort of tall blond leek who dresses like a penniless Bohemian. If there is one thing I despise, it's the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor.... Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man's scorn for a poor man's longing.

As the novel opens, Paloma, because of her disgust with the world around her, has decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday. Mme. Renée isn't exactly happy in her life, but she has become comfortable with her private arrangements.

In their diaries, both Renée and Paloma specialize in recognizing naked emperors -- about philosophy: "Phenomenology is a fraud"; about a food critic: " To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato...without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of vir