In Paul Watkins' ambitious new novel, The Forger, a young American artist named David Halifax arrives by train in Paris in the fateful summer of 1939. France is poised on the brink of German invasion. War is in the air. Halifax wants to paint masterpieces, and he’s finally arrived in the sacred city of his calling. As he walks through the station, one of his suitcases falls open. Paintbrushes and tubes of paint come tumbling out. He scrambles to retrieve them, and a gendarme in a black uniform approaches. In time-honored fashion, echoing a thousand other Philistines, in a thousand other works of fiction, from the era of Hugo and Balzac to the present day, in movies, TV shows, and operas, the cop pronounces a sentence on the bohemian. "Just what we need," he says. "Another artist."