Whereabouts

 

 

Jhumpa Lahiri has a new book out. A couple years ago she moved to Italy, taught herself Italian, and then decided that she would write her next novel in Italian. She did that, and published it in Italy, and then translated it herself back from the Italian into English and published it in the U.S. and Britain, with the title Whereabouts. It  has an unusual structure for a novel. It consists of 46 short essay-ish reflections about what goes on in the narrator's mind as she recalls various places she finds herself in as she goes about her life. The chapters have titles that are prepositional phrases like "On the Street" and "In the Bookstore" and "At My House" and "By the Sea." They're all really short, none more than three or four pages, some less than one page. As you read them in sequence you get a kind of indirect portrait of the woman telling these stories: she's middle-aged, she lives by herself, she's thoughtful and observant, formal in her use of language, independent, but still a little uncertain of herself.

There's a writing exercise that I sometimes ask my students to do that is modeled on the idea of  a picture and a caption. It's a very straightforward and effective way of exploring and developing your own thinking. I sometimes ask my students to write something in that form, which basically amounts to a two-part dance: "Tell me what you see." (The Picture) and then "Tell me what you think about what you see" (The Caption.") A lot of the chapters in Whereabouts are built that way. Here's one, for example:

In the Sun

    Today there are protests downtown, and the helicopters have been circling the city all morning. But it's the sun that wakes me up, and beckons me to my desk, where I write, wrapped in my robe, and then it draws me down to the piazza, where I'm greeted by the contained mayhem of my neighborhood.
    It's a splendid Saturday, the first warm day. Only a few people are still wearing boots, I see jackets unzipped and the blistered heels of girls in flip-flops who can't stand their punishing leather ballerina flats anymore. Even though it's a Saturday there's still a dash of elegance to how people are dressed: the bold shade of a jacket, the tight lines of a dress. It feels like a party effortlessly organized at the last minute. The piazza becomes a beach on days like this, and a sense of well-being, of euphoria, permeates the air. All the stores are full of people, long lines at the bank machine, the butcher, the bakery, but no one's complaining. If anything they enjoy the wait. While I'm in line for a sandwich a woman says, "What a spectacular day." And the man behind her says, "This neighborhood is always spectacular."
    It's my turn for the sandwich.
    "Just wait and see how delicious this is going to be," the man behind the counter says. He's known me forever and makes me the same sandwich at least three times a week. "Today it's going to be the best ever."
    He dips a ladle into a bucket on the counter. He weighs two slices of fresh cheese on the scale, arranges them on a roll, wraps the sandwich in a paper, and gives me the bill. "Here you go, my dear."
    It hardly costs anything. I look for a place to sit and find a spot in the playground where they deal drugs at night, but at this time of day it's bursting with kids, parents, dogs, also a few people on their own like me. But today I don't feel even slightly alone. I hear the babble of people as they chatter, on and on. I'm amazed at our impulse to express ourselves, tell stories to one another. The simple sandwich I always get amazes me too. As I eat it, as my body bakes in the sun that pours down on my neighborhood, each bit, feeling sacred, reminds me that I'm not forsaken.

An ordinary day, described with some nice specific details. The narrator goes out, she sees people, she buys a sandwich. An ordinary day, yes, but also extraordinary, as all ordinary days are, if we can bring ourselves to experience them fully, deeply mysterious, or "sacred," as she puts it. In the last line she's reminded that she's "not forsaken," which would seem to imply that there are times when she does in fact feel forsaken. That actually is one of the recurring themes in the book: how being an independent woman is kind of a double-edge sword. Sometimes you feel empowered, sometimes you just feel lonely.

There's also the moment when I feel like Lahiri is kind of winking at us, when she has her narrator talk about our powerful impulse to tell stories to one another, which is of course exactly what Lahiri is doing in writing this book. The act of storytelling is one of the ways that we can build bridges to one another.

This show-and-tell, observe-and-reflect exercise can can serve as a starting point for a story, a poem, or an essay. Since I'm planning to ask my students to try their hand at it in the summer session beginning next week, I've been playing with the format myself. Here's one I wrote last week. I'll post others later.

At the Mall

       Today I went to a nearby mall with my wife, who needed to get a new case for her phone, because the old one had cracked. They had exactly what she needed at a kiosk at one end of the mall, and on the way back to our car we passed an Anthropologie store that we both like to browse in. She likes it because they have a room at the back where they often have out-of-season clothes on sale, and I because they often have very thoughtfully and elegant designed art displays. Today, for example, they had on display in one window with a roughly but realistically shaped white wooden model of a seagull hanging by invisible threads as if in flight. It was followed by a series of other seagulls arcing across the window behind the light blue dress on display in front of a dark blue backdrop that suggested the sky. As you moved your eyes to the right, each seagull in the series became smaller, as if further away, and more abstracted as well: the ones in the middle were outlines cut out of bubble wrap, and the ones to the far right were two-dimensional cardboard cutouts with wording from magazines pasted on. The progression suggested a certain kind of artistic self-consciousness moving from immediate physicality to a more distant conceptual plane. Like I said, thoughtful. Philosophical, even. Certainly moreso than most windowdressings.
       Inside the store, they often have similarly clever and inventive displays, and sometimes works by local artists hang on the walls. So we walked around for a while. My wife found a sweater she liked at a very good price, and I did some people-watching and looked at the artwork. I saw one semi-abstract landscape painting, by an artist who has a studio not far from my house, which I noticed had been hung on the wall sideways, whether by accident or intention I have no idea. When my wife was ready, there was a line at the register, so I told her I'd sit outside while she checked out.
       I sat down in one of the tables outside the store facing a statue of a duck next to a fountain which sometimes spouts water and sometimes does not. Today it was not. There were three wooden Adirondack chairs next to the fountain. In one sat a black-haired boy about three and a half or four years old. In the next sat his sister, who looked to be maybe six. Dad, an athletic-looking guy in a baseball cap wearing a blue soccer jersey with "ITALIA" written on the back, was sitting in the third chair, the one closest to me, peering intently at his phone screen.
       The little boy got up and started jumping up onto the fountain's raised platform, and then jumping back down. As he landed each time, he would let out a sharp cry and then glance over at his dad to see if had noticed. He hadn't. He did this perhaps ten or twelve times, and dad kept ignoring him. The boy took a coin out his pocket and tried to put in on the head of duck, but as soon as he let it go it rolled off the duck, bounced on the platform, and disappeared into the nearby bushes. The boy, momentarily sobered, went over to look for it, but could not see it, so he turned back and went over to dad and asked, "Where's mommy?"
       Dad looked up from his phone and gestured with his thumb to the store behind us. "She's in there," he said and turned his attention back to the phone.  "I want to see mommy," said the boy. Getting no response, he pulled back his arm and smacked his knee. "I want mommy, "he cried, louder now.
       Dad pulled out a stuffed turtle toy and said, "Go over there and I'll throw this to you." The kid ran about fifty feet away and turned. "Throw it to me," he said. "That's too far, his father said. "Come closer."
       "No! Throw it to me."
       His sister, who up until this point had been sitting quietly, hopped up and positioned herself between her brother and her dad, with her arms out. Dad threw the turtle to her.  She dropped it, but picked it up and threw it back to him. The boy was screaming, "Throw it to me!"
       "You're too far away," said Dad, tossing it again the girl, who dropped it again.
       That made the boy even more upset. He ran over to dad. "Where's mommy?" he demanded.
       "I told you, Mommy is in the store."
       "I want to see mommy NOW!!"
       "Mommy's not here. You're going to have to deal with it."
       The boy started slapping his fathers knees and screaming. "NO! NO! NO! I want mommy!!"
       Dad grabbed his arms. "Don't do that," he said. "You do that any more, you're going to be sorry."
       At this point the kid went into a total screaming meltdown, attracting the attention of all the people eating outside across the plaza and all the passersby. "Knock it off," said Dad. "All these people are looking at you. They'll think you don't know how to behave."
       "I DON'T CARE!! I DON'T CARE, I WANT MOMMY!!!" He was slapping at his father with both hands and screaming while his sister sat quietly in the chair beside them, watching.
       That was the point at which my wife walked out of the store with her package in her hand. She looked at the boy screaming and the dad sitting there. I stood up to meet her.
       "What happened, did he fall down and hurt himself?"
       "Nope. Nothing that simple. Let's head to the car. I'll tell you along the way."

An observant reader like yourself will have noticed that the narrative is heavy on the observation and light on the reflection. I thought about tacking on some sort of commentary, but decided against it. What I might choose to say is, if I've accomplished my task, implied, and perhaps better left unsaid. The point of undertaking an exercise like this is to get a piece of writing underway. If you are lucky, the writing will turn out to have a mind of its own, and will lead you to a different place than the one you might have anticipated you would wind up at. Or, as William Stafford puts it in his essay "A Way of Writing,"—which remains my all-time favorite commentary on the art of writing, and one which every year I ask my students to read—"A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."