The Writer's Craft and
Excellence in the Mundane
by
Barbara Jones

Delivered to
The Fortnightly of Chicago and
The Chicago Literary Club
March 7, 2003

As I was dithering, not so very long ago, about how to get a start on this paper, a wise friend counseled that I write about something I love. Now, as this wise friend is a frequenter of the book discussion group here at the Fortnightly, it was not difficult for me to determine that my topic should somehow touch upon books - or, more specifically, novels, and our enjoyment of them, which after all, also seemed appropriate for "An Evening with the Chicago Literary Club."

It may seem, when one first considers, that fiction - especially that to be found on the various top-10 lists, is full of outrageous characters, improbable situations, and scandalous behavior. Well, it is. But may I submit to you this evening that some of the most meaningful and artful fiction also makes use of the common, everyday, unremarkable, and unnoticed bits if life - that is to say, the mundane. Hence, my title: The Writer's Craft and Excellence in the Mundane.


Now, I've already gotten myself into trouble because what any person considers to be excellent writing is sure to be disputed by the next fellow. This phenomenon may well be illustrated by our own Fortnightly Book Discussion Group - not that we ever disagree with one another - but we are sometimes at odds with book reviewers and the general public. For example, one of our maxims seems to be: "No sex, please, we're Fortnightlians." But that would take some further explanation, and, as they say, "we're not going there."

Where we are going is to the fictional realms drawn for us by two authors whose books we have recently read here at the Fortnightly. We will examine how, within the whirlwind of action and drama, the still small voice of the mundane contributes to excellence in writing - whatever that might be. Harold Bloom, in How to Read and Why, suggests that we should read novels "as they were read in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: for aesthetic pleasure and spiritual insight." Let us then, for now, say that excellent writing is that which provides one or both of these.

My first novel is Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Our group debated whether Bel Canto was in fact an "excellent" book. As I remember, one of the primary objections to considering it so was the problem that it is "not realistic." Harold Bloom, writing about a different author -

Calvino - and a different book - Invisible Cities, wrote "Marco Polo's cities never were, and never could be, and yet most readers would go there, if only we might."

In Bel Canto, a world-renowned lyric soprano is brought to a backwards South American country to lure a Japanese CEO to an elegant, no-expenses-spared birthday party, to be given in his honor, all in the (vain) hope that the executive, and his company, will "smile upon" the poor host country - a factory, perhaps, to help move the economy away from poppy farming? Luminaries and dignitaries assemble at the stately home of the Vice President (the President himself has stayed home so as not to miss a long-awaited episode of his favorite television programme). All is beautiful, especially the soprano - and her voice - until, late in the evening, the lights go out. Terrorists, previously concealed in the air conditioning ducts, have taken over the mansion.

All this may seem somewhat fantastic, but what follows is more so, for far from the terrorist scenarios we have come to imagine, and witness, in recent times, in Bel Canto, the terrorists and hostages form a community, one might even say a loving community. When, in the end, the terrorists are all shot down, we do not cheer, but weep. Realistic? No. And yet, believable. Harold Bloom, in the essay mentioned earlier, summarizes what he calls "Calvino's wisdom" by quoting from Invisible Cities: " seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." I think perhaps the author is trying to do this in the fictional world of Bel Canto.

But what of the mundane? In Bel Canto, the juxtaposition of the everyday against the situations lived out by the terrorists and hostages both puts the reader inside that fictional world - it may not exist, yet we are there - and also reveals to us our own situation in our own real world. Consider, for example, the following passage:
The soldiers spent most of their days exploring the house, eating the pistachio nuts they found in the pantry, sniffing the lavender hand lotion in the bathroom. The house offered up no end of curiosities: closets the size of some houses they had seen, bedrooms where no one slept, cupboards that held nothing but rolls of colored paper and ribbon.
Or, here is another, in which the Japanese executive considers the young age of some of the terrorists, superimposing everyday images of his own children upon them:
Mr. Hosokawa knew he was a poor judge of children. In Japan, he often saw young people who looked to be no more than ten behind the wheels of cars. His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization. He tried to picture them, their plastic daisy barrettes and short white socks, picking at the door frame with the sharp tip of a knife.
In another passage, the mundane figures in a character sketch of the Vice President, Ruben Iglesias:
As far as . . . [the translator] could tell, there were only two hostages who were not fabulously wealthy and powerful: himself and the priest, and they were the only two who were made to work. Of course, the Vice President worked, but not because anyone had asked him to. He seemed to think that the comfort of his guests was still his responsibility. He was always serving sandwiches and picking up cups. He washed the dishes and swept and twice a day he mopped up the floors in the lavatories. With a dishtowel knotted around his waist, he took on the qualities of a charming hotel concierge. He would ask, would you like some tea? He would ask, would it be too much of an imposition to vacuum beneath the chair in which you were sitting? Everyone was very fond of Ruben. Everyone had completely forgotten that he was the Vice President of the country.
And we forget that we are in a fictional place, because we, too, are fond of this Vice President who, among his other virtues, will concern himself with the mundane.

After many weeks of captivity, the generals somewhat arbitrarily decide to let everyone go outside from time to time. The first day in the garden, Ruben tries to engage the bright young boy, Ishmael, to help him weed the flower beds.
"You know I can't come over," Ishmael said, shifting his rifle to his other shoulder.
"Ah, you could come over," Ruben said. "You just don't want to get your hands dirty."

Ruben smiled at the boy. Truly, he wished he could come over. He would teach him which of the plants were weeds. He found himself thinking that Ishmael could be his son, his other son. They were both on the small side, and anyway, people would believe whatever you told them. There would be plenty of room for one more small boy.

On the last day, they are again in the garden, this time, working together.

Ruben had been able to petition a spade and a small hand rake from the gardener's shed, which was locked, and he turned over the soil in the flower beds. . . . Ishmael skipped the [soccer] game in order to help him. He didn't mind. He never liked to play. Ruben gave him a silver serving spoon with which to dig. "My father had a wonderful way with plants," Ruben told him. "All he had to do was say a few kind words to the ground and here they would come. . . . "

"He would be proud of us now," Ishmael said.
Suddenly, their peaceful world is shattered by the sound of guns - the "official" guns which have come to put an end to the stalemate. Everyone screams, shouts and runs in the chaos. The priest, knocked to the ground
. . . opened his eyes and found himself looking at Ishmael, his friend, not two minutes dead. The Vice President was crying into the boy's neck, his eyes pressed closed, his mouth stretched open wide. He was holding his child's lovely head in his hands. In Ishmael's hands was the spoon with which he had been digging.
One might say that the writer of Bel Canto turns fiction into reality. In my second book, the author turns reality into fiction. At the opening of Andrei Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers, a young boy and his sister, spending the summer holidays with their grandmother in the provincial town at the edge of the steppe where she had been stranded after the war, one day, without meaning to, upset their grandmother by carelessly disarranging some mementos. That evening they wait as usual, on the balcony of the apartment, while she finishes her mending.
Not daring to break her silence, we cast furtive glances at her from time to time: was she going to share a new and even more secret confidence with us? . . . Without admitting it to ourselves, we were lying in wait for her first word, her intonation. Our suspense - the spectator's fascination with the tightrope walker - was a mixture of rather cruel curiosity and a vague unease. . . .

However, she seemed not even to notice our tense presence. Her hands remained motionless in her lap; her gaze was lost in the transparency of the sky. The trace of a smile illuminated her lips. . . .

"At that time I must have been almost your age; it was the winter of 1910. The Seine had turned into a real sea. The people of Paris traveled round by boat. The streets were like rivers; the squares, like great lakes. And what astonished me most was the silence. . . ."

On our balcony we heard the sleepy silence of flooded Paris. The lapping of a few waves when a boat went by, a muffled voice at the end of a drowned avenue.
The children, and the reader, too, are transported to another world - to the France of the privileged early childhood of Charlotte Lemonnier, their grandmother. Thus begins the story of a woman whose life, as the narrator puts it, "spans the crucial moments in the history of our country - she had lived under the Tsar and survived Stalin's purges; she had come through the war . . . . her life [was] traced against the background of the empire's bloodiest century."

Such a story may seem an unlikely place to find the mundane, but in fact many passages throughout the novel rely upon it for their meaning and eloquence. (A footnote here: the Russian author wrote in French - we are the beneficiaries of the English translation.) Here are two passages, a pair as it were, both set in the old Siberian log house, or izba, where, in the first, Charlotte, as a young girl, lives with her mother, Albertine. The setting is ordinary - to the characters, if not to us - and the nature of the actions routine:
At that time they lived in an old izba on the outskirts of the town. . . .
It was so good, on returning from school, to climb up the old wooden steps that crunched under your feet; to pass through a dim entrance hall with walls made of great logs, which were covered in a thick coat of hoarfrost; and to push at the heavy door, which yielded with a brief, very lifelike groan. And there, in the room, one could remain for a moment without lighting the lamp, watching the little low window becoming suffused with the violet dusk, listening to snowy gusts of wind tinkling against the windowpane. Leaning back against the broad, hot flank of the big stove, Charlotte felt the heat slowly penetrating beneath her coat. She held her frozen hands to the warm stove - the stove seemed to her to be the enormous heart of this old izba. And beneath the soles of her felt boots the last lumps of ice were melting.
In the second passage, Charlotte has returned to Russia after almost a decade, having spent the war years in France. It is 1922. She has come to find her mother, if possible. From Moscow, she has journeyed two months to finally approach the Siberian town of her childhood:
Charlotte hoped for little from this visit. For a long time she had prepared herself to receive the news that would leave no hope: death, madness, disappearance. . . .

In the last days her exhaustion had been such that she thought only of the warmth of the great stove, against whose flank she would lean her back as she collapsed on the floor.

From the izba steps she caught sight of an old woman underneath a stunted apple tree. . . . Charlotte called to her, but the old peasant woman did not turn round . . . .

With a thrust of her shoulder she pushed the door. In the dark, cold hall she saw a whole store of wood - planks from boxes, floorboards, and even, in a little black-and-white heap, the keys of a piano. . . .

On entering the room, her first gesture was to touch the stones of the stove. They were warm. Charlotte felt a pleasantly giddy sensation. She was already about to let herself slip down beside the stove when she noticed an open book on the table . . . . A little ancient volume with rough paper. Leaning on a bench, she bent over the open pages. . . . It was a French book.

The old woman in the black shawl came in and seemed not to be surprised to see this slim young woman rising from her bench. The dry branches she carried under her arm trailed long filaments of snow on the floor. Her withered face resembled that of one of the old peasant women of that Siberian country. Her lips, covered in a fine network of wrinkles, trembled. And it was from this mouth, from the desiccated breast of this unrecognizable being, that the voice of Albertine rang out, a voice of which not a single note had altered.

"All these years I only dreaded one thing: that you might come back here!"
In this sublimely written passage, the author has conjured the whole history of a country and a people while also providing an exquisite portrayal of our two characters, and their relationship.

In another passage, the mundane issue of "our daily bread," to which we readers seldom give a second thought, is put into a new light. Because food is so scarce, Albertine collects herbs from the taiga. They hang in the hall to dry, then are taken down to make "Siberian soup."
The real famine, Albertine knew, would come in the spring. . . . There was not a single bunch of plants left on the walls of the entrance hall, the market was deserted. In May they fled their izba, without really knowing where to go. . .
. . . a kulak . . . accepted them as day laborers on his farm. . . .

"I'll not pay you anything," he said, making no bones about it. "Bed and board. If I take you on, it's not for your pretty faces. I need hands."
They work endlessly, Charlotte in the field and Albertine sewing sacks for the harvest.

One evening Charlotte's tiredness was such that, when she met the owner of the farm, she started speaking to him in French. The peasant's beard was stirred with a profound movement, his eyes widened - he was smiling. . . .

As agreed, the peasant paid them nothing. In the autumn, when they were preparing to go back to the town, he showed them a cart with a load covered in a newly homespun cloth.
"He'll drive you," he said, glancing at the old peasant perched on the driver's seat.

Albertine and Charlotte thanked him and hauled themselves up on the edge of the cart, which was laden with crates, sacks, and packages.

"Are you sending all this to market?" asked Charlotte, to fill the awkward silence of these last few minutes.

"No. That's what you've earned."

. . . . Beneath the cover Charlotte and her mother discovered three sacks of potatoes, two sacks of corn, a keg of honey, four enormous pumpkins, and several crates of vegetables, beans, and apples. In one corner they caught sight of half a dozen hens with their legs tied; and a cock in their midst, flashing belligerent and angry glances.

"I'm going to dry some bunches of herbs all the same," said Albertine, when she finally succeeded in tearing her eyes from all this treasure. "You never know. . . . "
Dreams of My Russian Summers is the story not only of Charlotte, but also of the narrator, the young boy on the balcony, listening to his grandmother's stories, who grows up and struggles with his dual heritage - Russian and French, East and West. After a particularly bleak and depressed period of his young adult life, now lived in Paris, he is all at once brought back to joy and purpose. He happens to see a little plaque fixed a meter from the ground which reads: Flood level January 1910.
. . . It was not memory, but life itself. I was not reliving; I was living. Sensations that seemed very humble sensations. The warmth of the wooden handrail of a balcony hanging in the air on a summer's evening. The dry, piquant scents of plants.... The soft rustling of pages on the knees of a woman seated amid flowers. Her gray hair. Her voice . . .
He comprehends that, through the stories his grandmother has shared with him - her own and those of literature - he has come to glimpse what he calls "the mysterious consonance of eternal moments." He decides "through the silent work of memory I must learn the notation of these moments. Learn to preserve their timelessness amid the routine of everyday actions, amid the numbness of banal words. . . ." He becomes a writer.

I hope these examples have shown that, from the pen of an excellent writer, the mundane may be many things: It may provide a new perspective, allowing us to step outside of ourselves. It may provide a backdrop against which the drama unfolds. It may highlight a contrast, or tap into the regions of the collective unconscious. It may be used to create a character, set a scene or evoke an atmosphere. It may be prophetic - not necessarily in the sense of seeing into the future, but rather in helping us to recognize an unnoticed important something in our midst. Or it may simply contribute to the telling of a good story.

Writers, like all artists, are magicians. They create something, as it were, out of nothing - or perhaps, at times, from what others might consider to be nothing - the mundane! I hope that the excerpts I have shared with you this evening have persuaded you that our enjoyment of a good book owes much to excellence in the mundane.