Isabel Walker, the main character in Diane Johnson's Le Divorce (1997), represents a tentative effort to project a different American attitude toward France and the French. This change will develop slowly over the course of a novel, whose principal irony is that as Isabel's openness increases, the French attitude toward Americans, relatively positive at the beginning of Le Divorce, begins to regress until, toward the end, it appears to be an updated version of what Mme Bellegarde and her older son thought about Christopher Newman in The American.

L'Américaine à Paris is the French translation of Diane Johnson's bestseller, which deals with the travails, triumphs, and disappointments of a young American woman in contemporary France. Part of the novel's appeal stems from Johnson's skill at showing, with considerable humor, how French and Americans’ perceptions of each other are largely filtered through longstanding clichés. Thus, Americans like Paris but are somewhat distrustful of the French, whereas a Frenchman might be charmed by a young woman's “Americanness,” without being able to explain what it is (124). Americans tend to be uncultivated, while the French are sophisticated, yet fearful that their traditional way of life has been imperiled by the changes wrought by the influx of Americans: “The end of la civilization française? … I suppose when it became ‘fromage ou dessert’ instead of ‘fromage et dessert’” (41; emphasis original).