Tell: a novel, by Jonathan Buckley

reviewed by Celine Nguyen

How should a critic approach a formally experimental novel? The stranger the work, the more unsatisfying it can feel—for this critic, at least—to write something straightforward and uniform. This review responds to a work by imitating its style, inspired by the artist and writer Francis Whorrall-Campbell’s essay on criticism as fanfiction. “Fan fiction,” Whorrall-Campbell writes, “is a mode of amateur creative writing…based upon an existing cultural object.” And criticism? “[A] professionalized – although not necessarily remunerated – field of discourse production that seeks to understand…a work of art.” Both fans and critics want to get as close to the work as possible, observing and unfolding its intentions.

FIRST SESSION

Yes. We can start with Curtis. He’s the main character of the novel, really. Unimaginably wealthy man, rags-to-riches archetype. You get the picture once you realize the narrator of the novel is Curtis’s gardener. Employed at this big house in Scotland—that’s where most of the story takes place. 

[H]e wasn’t flashy. I know, you look at the palace and you say: ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ A house with twenty bedrooms and its own private lake. Point taken.

You need a lot of staff to maintain a place like that. A chauffeur, housekeeper, maids. And that’s just the start. All But I’ll get to the staff later. Right away you understand that Curtis is some kind of contemporary Croesus, but one that’s a little feeble, declining. Not quite pitiable yet. But his story is coming to a close; all that’s left is to look back on his life. The successes, the tragedies.

[Inaudible]

…his wife, yes. There’s always a dead wife to make these characters sympathetic, isn’t there? I’m trying to establish some distance, between me and the novel, but I’ll be frank. I don’t mind a love story. May even hunger for them, from time to time. So Curtis Doyle, as a young man, he’s nothing special. He meets this woman, Lily Porter. Already married. A daughter. Didn’t stop them. They end up together, of course, and Curtis becomes who he is—the retail empire, the wealth, the art collection—because of Lily. “The big idea was her idea,” the gardener tells us. “Curtis always admitted that.” There’s the family, too. Two sons and a wayward stepdaughter. Everything picture-perfect. Then Lily dies.

[Pause]

The story’s about Curtis, but everything about Curtis ends up turning towards this loss. The loss at the center of his life. And then he has an accident. Head-on crash while in Cambodia, doing a tour of his garment factories. Six months to recover. You start reading Buckley’s novel, and you’re immediately confronted with these two losses: The loss of love, and the loss of a coherent, capable Curtis. After the accident—well. The gardener’s not going to say he’s faltering, he’s senile. But something’s off, that’s made very clear. “Things that should have been automatic weren’t…Someone who’d always been on top of things, on top of everything, and then this was happening. His brain had hijacked him.”

[Indistinct]

Curtis Mark Two, the gardener calls him. But Curtis Mark One, the one that married Lily, the one that becomes just about the wealthiest man in Britain. Half of the novel is about that man, and you’re just lingering on, really savoring all these stories about him. Especially when it’s about “his main extravagance,” collecting art. The women that help him with it too. There’s Lara, an art journalist writing a book about Curtis. A confidant and friend who’s been intimate with Curtis for a number of years—platonically, I mean. And Karolina, his art consultant. Swiss. Beautiful. “[T]he way she walked,” the gardener tells us, “it was like her head was made of glass and only lightly attached. Always groomed to the highest finish.” There’s some intimacy there, too, but in the more…Well. I won’t get into it. You understand. The gardener is quite frank though. Curtis taking up with different women, especially after Lily’s death. But, as the gardener notes, “the occasional one-nighter isn’t incompatible with being devoted to your wife.” Especially the memory of your wife. I’d agree, I think.

But it’s not really about the women, in any case. And some of the women don’t matter at all. “Non-speaking parts,” that’s who the gardener describes it. The art matters. Lavish descriptions. Makes you think they’re real. They could be. When Buckley describes a photograph by a Japanese artist, some kind of minimalist shot of the sea, with “water as smooth-looking as the sky, as if everything was made of metal.” You go through the references: Hiroshi Sugimoto, maybe? Then a sculpture piece in Curtis’s home, a tabletop with found objects and ephemera and papers all glued into an assemblage. I spent an hour trying to figure it out. Then I texted a friend, and had to eventually confess I wasn’t even sure if the artist was real, it could have been fictional. Some things are. There’s some kind of architecturally elaborate shed on the grounds, pure glass facing the lake, and an unbroken expanse of burned wood on the other side. Buckley even mentions the name of the architect: Akseli Lehtinen. I googled him thinking I’d get something real, but no. Just another character in the novel. 

The art matters and the uncertain feeling of reality—like the gardener is really just speaking to you about someone who appears in the tabloids, one of the Forbes list billionaires. Even though he’s just a character, his staff and his family and his women. All these characters just arranged around Curtis. Like he’s the sun at the center of their universe. 

[Pause]

Which he is, in a way. Because of the money. With money you can influence anyone, steer everyone into a subordinate position. The gardener’s obviously beholden to him. Professionally obligated to understand the man that’s putting a roof over her head. But Curtis makes it easy on her, he’s not a bad employer. “We worked for him,” she tells her interlocuter, “but we weren’t his servants, if you know what I mean. Staff is what we were. Staff and servants are not the same thing.” And her relationship to Curtis isn’t like the relationship his sons have. They need his approval in a different way. It’s dramatized well. The sons end up looking a bit inadequate next to Curtis, and their wives are trying to get in his good books, because they know what’s on the line. Inheritances aren’t guaranteed, are they?

[Inaudible]

She’s interesting. The gardener, I mean. Gave me a shock to realize she was a woman. Had an expert frankness, a kind of appraising quality, when describing the women in Curtis’s life. His PA Josefine, for example: “So gorgeous you actually couldn’t look at her for more than two seconds at a time.” Or Karolina again: “the physique was outstanding…Magnificent legs.” A man’s voice, I thought. But women notice that kind of thing too, they understand how beauty distorts and pulls at those around you. Not as much as wealth, though.

You start reading, and it’s clear that it’s a story about Curtis and his wealth. How it influences those around him, how everyone is pulled inexorably inwards, how close or far they get to him, what they want from him. But then it’s clear that some people hold their own. The staff remain at a remove. Their relationship to Curtis is so clear: He employs them, he pays them handsomely. A very nice Christmas bonus. Still. The staff just work for him, and that gives them a kind of clarity, a sharpness. The view from downstairs, if you will. They get to observe everything, especially the gardener. She’s the void that turns out to be the center of the novel. 

[Inaudible]

I’m thinking of Rachel Cusk’s Outline now. How the woman it’s about just seems like this vessel for other people’s stories. She’s observing everyone else, she draws out everyone else’s stories, it’s like she’s hardly there at all. But of course she’s the observer at the center of all this.

SECOND SESSION

[Indistinct]

Well, I have to apologize first. Because I got something wrong the last time we spoke, when I said that Curtis is really who the story’s about. He’s at the center, no question about that. At the same time though, it’s not really about Curtis, or the wealth, or the art even, as much as I liked those passages. It’s a story about the storyteller. Or the gossiper, if you’d like. Or the voyeur, which is us. The readers. We want the luster of wealth to be revealed to us. And the sins of wealth. To put it crudely, we want the dirt. 

Novels are just gossip, aren’t they? Gossip about people who aren’t real but feel real. Catherine Gallagher said something about this once. About how we encounter characters “as deeply and impossibly familiar,” as if they really are part of our world. And their art collections, as I’ve said, might be part of our world too.

[Pause]

Buckley’s set up the novel well, I have to say. It’s very clever. The whole thing is just dialogue. A one-sided interview transcript. Five sessions. The gardener is speaking to someone, we don’t know who. She’s speaking to them in the same way I’m speaking to you. Very naturally. Just a chat. Telling us everything about Curtis and everyone around him. Eventually you realize her interlocutor is part of some—well, they’re making a film about Curtis. Explains why the gardener is always describing what people look like. What kind of actor should be cast for each person. Some of the descriptions are brutal. You know, she’s describing Conrad, the second son, and she goes: “If you’re casting the part of Conrad, you do not want someone who dominates the screen. You want a standard chap.” But everyone has someone in their live who’s quite distinctly and obviously ordinary. Nothing special about them. The side character.

And when you get into Curtis’s childhood—

[Inaudible]

You know you’re getting a real character portrait when the parents come up. The second half of the book starts getting into Curtis’s backstory, and of course it’s tragic. In a minor way. Single mother who didn’t want him. Foster parents who did. But working class. A Midlands boy with an accent; “it’s not what most people would call a boardroom voice,” the gardener observes. And Curtis had to leave it behind to become the man who’s a worthy main character.

The way I’m describing it, you might think: How can the gardener know so much about this man? But Buckley convinces us. You realize how masterful he is with dialogue at some point. It’s not easy, but he makes it look easy. 

[Pause]

And it’s also because we want to be convinced. I certainly wanted that. We don’t question how the gardener can know so much about Curtis, the novelistic detail, the scenes she’s describing where she’s not even there, she would have heard about it secondhand. We don’t question everything we’ve come to know about a man who doesn’t even get to tell his own story. Gallagher had something to say about that, the artificiality of characters in fiction: “We seem to encounter,” she wrote, “something with the layers of a person but without the usual epistemological constraints on our knowledge.” 

You realize how many narratives are going on, layers and layers. Like a mille-feuille, all the frothy gossipy asides as decoration. I’m no good at metaphor. It feels wrong to compare such a British book to a French pastry. But you have Curtis, you have the story Curtis presents the art writer, Lara, about his life, you have the story Lara is writing—especially once she and Curtis have fallen out, and it gets juicy—then you have the gardener presenting the story to us. How many narratives are we at now? Four. But you see glimpses of even more. Everyone in Curtis’s world has to understand him, since they all depend on his money in some way. Or there’s an attraction to it, a draw. Each person in their world. And each world with a different depiction of Curtis: the businessman, the boy from the Midlands, the foster kid, the devoted husband, the astute art collector, the old man, the father, the stepfather.

You begin to realize how narratives can pile up about someone, if they’re powerful enough to shape the lives of those around them. But even ordinary people. You and me. The gardener, at some point she’s making a point about Curtis’s stepdaughter, who may be the least interesting character in the whole story, but still. A character. Present. The gardener is telling us about her, and she starts off with:

My mother, she always used to say that you can summarize a person with just one story. Absolutely anybody. Capture their whole character in a single scene. There’ll be one story, one anecdote, that tells you exactly who they are. I know that nobody is the same with everyone they meet. We show some people one side, other people another. I agree. But there’s someone at the center of it, someone who is me. The one who appears when there’s no show to put on. I can’t see that it’s a controversial idea. We all know there are things we would do and things we wouldn’t do, because of who we are. It’s like the Day of Judgement. Your soul gets weighed in the balance. Same thing. A single story gets put on the scales.

I read this and thought: She’s making a point about me, about everyone. About fiction. Why we read it. We know that all of us are tangled up in our contractions. We’re good and bad, virtuous and venal. The right story knocks all of that into the light, it exposes us. For better or worse. But sometimes we don’t want to be exposed. We want to be the gardener, not Curtis. The storyteller, not the main character. We want someone else to be thrown into relief. They could go through great losses in their life, and be broken down by them, and to us it’s just gossip. A story. You turn the page and their life ends, and yours continues.