The unsuspected links between far-flung lives, the reverberating after effects of decisions, the ravages of history – we are quite familiar with the notions of novels that transport us through multiple eras and locations. The novelist corrals the anxiety of time and the puzzlement of human affairs and tames them into docile understanding. Our service economy includes a thriving sector of novelists-as-social-workers striving magnanimously to compensate us for our benighted lives.
Jane Delury has produced her first novel, The Balcony, fully aware that this narrative structure has become a predictable staple. But in Delury’s work, banalities are generative materials, not end-products. In How Fiction Works, James Wood pinpoints “a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail.” If Flaubert perfected it, as Wood maintains, then Delury has shrewdly exploited her inheritance. An assiduous writer builds a new enterprise on the interest from her predecessor’s investments.
Her story is set in the fictional French village of Benneville. At the outset of the 20th century, Benneville is tucked within the countryside outside of Paris. By century’s end, it is “an industrial wash of smokestacks and faceless apartment buildings” and “absorbed by the Parisian suburbs.” But the three-storied limestone-façade manor house, the Léger estate, and the cottage beside it remain in place. Three generations come and go; the estate thrives with its gardens and topiaries, is plundered by neighbors in wartime, then undergoes restoration. In the novel’s eleven linked, tightly-wound chapters, Delury peoples the rooms, gardens and forest with a caretaker’s proprietary attentiveness.
Delury’s plotting is deft but plot here is secondary to the work’s psychological reality. Action in these chapters is restrained. The frisson of connection through time is created by the unanticipated reappearance of characters as the decades roil on. The manor house, cottage and outlying locations seem to absorb these lives into their spaces. Delury’s scenarios mainly comprise domestic situations, flecked with flashbacks and tensely casual dialogue. The generations grate on each other; husbands and wives struggle through surrender versus autonomy. If the gestures of the parents annoy their now-adult offspring, it is often because each of the latter seeks an elusive sufficiency in him- or herself. Habitual behavior suddenly yields a crucial thought, and all is changed, or so it seems.
In “Tintin in the Antilles (2006),” Hélène and her granddaughter Adèle are food shopping. The unnamed narrator says, “Though ten, Adèle had a boxy neck and drop to her chin of a middle-aged woman. Her body, dressed in black leggings and a black sweater and black leather flats, was as compact and formless as a button mushroom stump.” As they wait in line to pay for the coconut that Adèle wants, “A line formed behind, and [Hélène] heard the restrained sighs, the shuffle of feet, the irritated patience that passed as kindness now that she was old.” We are being nudged closer and closer to Hélène, whom we witnessed as a younger woman in an earlier chapter. And now her husband Jacques, whom we watched in his boyhood, is back at the cottage with a caregiver. He has had a stroke. When they arrive at the cottage, they try to open the coconut without success. Thoughts course through Hélène’s mind – Adele is too chubby and her mother is cruel. She considers her husband: “’You’re too good for me,’ he said on their fourth date. For many years of their marriage, Hélène had agreed.”
Then comes one of Delury’s illuminating reductions, spoken in Hélène’s interior dialogue with Adèle’s father, her son Emmanuel: “Some things you have to make simple even though they aren’t. You will see this when you look back after I’m dead.” Making complex, partially understood things simple is the signature gesture of The Balcony. It is also the gesture that gives the book its title – the fall of Madame Léger from the manor’s balcony in 1890. The reason is undisclosed, the motivation is perhaps suicidal. The simple perception seems adequate — and then not. The disquietude of The Balcony becomes strangely gorgeous.
If a full engagement with a writer’s style is to name its various aspects and ask Why?, then we may wonder why Delury has chosen the many-era, multi-perspective structure, an armature that abets the sense that we are capable of grasping history by the scruff. This returns us to “the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail.” Delury is a master when it comes to creating the illusion of the density of the actual. Her domestic scenarios vibrate with longeurs, eroded but stubborn griefs, desiring, assessing, regretting, and persisting. She encourages the reader to peer, not just casually observe. But also, she gives us a structure on which to feel secure, then shakes the ladder from below. The dated chapters are not arranged chronologically; the reader may lose track of time, lose one’s place, and have to glance back.
In “Half Life (2000),” an American woman named Kate, who is dating Hélène’s son Alexis (in a later chapter, their relationship will change), bewails, “At some moment in all of her relationships, generally after a few months, she experienced the impossibility of being understood or of understanding the other person. She knew why she didn’t want to get married or have children. Why didn’t Alexis?” And yet, and yet … several pages later, Alexis gives her a certain look, “And that had been the sign that she’d needed.” If initially we had been asked to “understand” her posture regarding Alexis and marriage, we understand both less and more by the end of the chapter. We are charmingly confused by the evolving clarities of the speaking and writing.
The momentous disruption of history, figured here as the German occupation and Allied bombing of the area, is but a moderate weight. It is not novelistic window dressing, but it is also not a primary source of the novel’s brooding melancholy. There is something else. What is it? The thing made simple, to be seen.
[Published by Little Brown March 27, 2018. 256 pages, $26.00 hardcover]