The Glass Room/Simon Mawer: Reflections

As a kid, I rustled around in my great uncle's studio—the trunk of drawings, the crinkle of yellow trace, the endless stubs of pencils and color, the proof of his work as an architect of the Waldorf Astoria, the Pierre, so many other buildings.  As a new graduate of Penn, with a degree in the history of science, I went to work for an architectural firm—anything, I thought then, to get me close to those who shape and color space.  As a young woman, I fell in love with, I married, an architect.  I hung out with his friends, and they became mine.  Architecture was this home's second language.

And so I expected to be taken in, to be entranced by, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room—a novel of ideas, as many have written, a novel in which a single house designed by a Mies van der Rohe type genius, shapes and frames all 400 pages of the story.  But shapes and frames is not the same thing as animates—and it was this, this animating force, that I missed in what is surely a thoroughly well-researched (the house in the book is based on an actual house in Central Europe) and well-told tale that takes the reader from the modern age of the 1920s through the Nazi invasion and aftermath.  The glass house stands through it all—home, laboratory, school, museum.  The people—a Jewish industrialist and his Gentile wife, their children, the industrialist's lover and her child, the wife's almost-lover (her best friend, Hana), an anthropological doctor, a dancer—pass through. 

Such is life, of course.  Such is our reality.  We are all, only, passing through.  But real life need not be pinched to fit the confines of a book—the concept of a book.  In real life, often, loose ends are loose ends.  Coincidence is not packaged.  The messy bang-ups often lead nowhere.  They just are—signifying, perhaps, nothing. 

The Glass Room made me think, a lot, about what draws readers in and what keeps them slightly removed, about the difference between dazzling and engaging, about the sheen of perfection and the power of passion (however messy that might be).  It takes enormous skill to write a book like The Glass Room, and certainly Mawer is abundantly skilled.  But for this one reader, more deviation from idea would have been welcome, so as to make more room for heart.

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Family Portrait

My cousin Libby gave my brother the gift of family photographs years ago—slides, mostly, taken by my father's father, which my brother systematically recovered and scanned. This is the mystery photo in the bunch. My father's father and mother to the left. My Uncle Lloyd (architect of the Waldorf Astoria and other grand buildings) and Aunt Anne beside them. The gorgeous Marilyn Monroe-like creature and the woman behind her (we don't know who they are).

And then the child—dressed so finely in blue silk and turned-up sleeves and determined to sour the family pose. I wonder who she is. I wonder if she recalls the moment, or would, were she to find this picture here.

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Nothing but Ghosts and the Lost Painting

A few weeks ago the entirely delightful Kelsey Boeckermann invited me to tell the story behind the making of the Nothing but Ghosts cover. Is it all right, I emailed back, if much of the process went on beyond closed doors—and if I had nothing to do with the outcome, save for holding my breath until the official unveiling and thanking my editor and cover designer to great excess in the aftermath?

Sure, Kelsey said, and thank goodness. Because that, in this case, is the absolute truth: Nothing but Ghosts, the cover, is the gift that I was given by two people who worked extremely hard on its behalf. Jill Santopolo, my editor, has appeared on this blog many times before—never gratuitously, always and only because she makes my writing life an infinitely richer one. Carla Weise has had her moments here as well; who wouldn't appreciate an art director who goes the distance for an author she has never even met? (Though I'm coming, Carla, and I'm going to find you.)

Like all my work—the memoirs, the poems, the autobiography of the river, the corporate fable, the young adult novels—Nothing but Ghosts is populated by the known, the actual. In this case, a version of Chanticleer garden, also the subject of my fifth memoir, forms a fictionalized backdrop. Katie, my narrator, is living through loss, something I have had to learn to do as well. And then there's this painting that Katie's father is restoring—scenes inspired by the restoration of the inherited family painting shown above.

In the novel, the painting is similarly strangely skied and time obscured. In real life, the painting was the work of my great uncle, Lloyd Morgan, who designed the Waldorf Astoria, the Pierre, the Boca Raton, and so many other indelible monuments to another time. Years ago, Lloyd Morgan also painted each of his buildings into this single skyscape; when he passed away, the 16 foot x 4 foot canvas was entrusted to my father. Under my father's direction and by the talents of two art restorers, the canvas (once referred to as "the lost painting" in architectural magazines) was brought back to life and now hangs in the Wolfsonian Gallery at Florida International University.

In any case, Kelsey's blogged the Nothing but Ghosts cover story today. Spend some time with her, on her site.

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