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A memoir in pieces
By Michael Cunningham |
September 20, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE English novelist Margaret Drabble recently announced that, having written 17 novels, she does not intend to write another. Three years after "The Sea Lady," her final novel, she offers instead "The Pattern in the Carpet," which is a hybrid of sorts, part memoir and part discourse on the history of the jigsaw puzzle.
The book, according to Drabble, started out as a straightforward history and then evolved into, as she puts it in the book's subtitle, "A Personal History With Jigsaws."
Drabble's novels are insightful, powerfully written, utterly unsentimental and driven by political conviction. They're not revolutionary, but they're rigorous.
She has written a number of nonfiction books, among them biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and edited two editions of "The Oxford Companion to English Literature."
So, Margaret Drabble, august writer and scholar, what is it about jigsaw puzzles?
"The Pattern in the Carpet" is a discursive, loosely organized mix of Drabble's memories -- some but not all of them having to do with solving puzzles -- and her accounts of her own research into the history of jigsaws and other games. The opening chapters are largely devoted to Drabble's childhood puzzle-mate, her Auntie Phyl. Drabble doesn't give us the rollicking old eccentric we'd get from Dickens or Gaskell. Aunt Phyl likes excursions, enjoys lunch in a pub and takes briefly in her old age to an unfortunate girlish hairstyle. But, lacking either the high peculiarity of a Dickens or a Gaskell character, or the inner life of an outwardly ordinary person such as Leopold Bloom or Clarissa Dalloway, Aunt Phyl can feel, disquietingly, like just the sort of limited, uninspiring figure for whom the jigsaw puzzle, indeed the whole notion of "killing time," was devised.
Beginning with Chapter 9, we take what will prove to be intermittent leave of Aunt Phyl and the rest of Drabble's family, and begin to learn a bit about the origins, meaning and mystery of games in general.
I say "mystery" because so many of us love games, and devote considerable time and energy to them, though they generally result in nothing concrete, useful or profitable. In this regard, the jigsaw puzzle is especially mysterious. Most games, after all, involve a battle of wits. But it is, as Drabble points out, the limits of the jigsaw that make it so compelling. "The jigsaw is the very opposite of the novel. The novel is formless and frameless. It has no blueprint, no pattern, no edges." In completing a jigsaw puzzle, you neither excel nor disappoint. You just go on and then, one day, order has been recreated. There's no denying that we as a species are fond of order, whether we create it imperfectly out of nothing (as one does in writing a novel) or re-establish it, piece by piece, perfectly, on the dining room table.
"The Pattern in the Carpet" -- a reference to the Henry James short story "The Figure in the Carpet," in which a celebrated author dies without having conveyed to the world at large the secret idea that links all his books -- rambles a bit as it moves back and forth between Drabble's life and the history of the jigsaw.
One wonders if the book became the hybrid it is in part because the history of the jigsaw puzzle, which began as a tool to teach children geography, is not long or particularly interesting.
Drabble's book does have force and gravity. She uses the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle to assert that life is composed of small undramatic pieces, and not of the cataclysmic events on which some novelists insist. She argues, convincingly, that even in matters of far greater consequence than finishing a jigsaw puzzle, the entire notion of realizing a goal is a useful but romantic delusion, meant to keep us moving through the days.
She writes that our human desire to create order, to solve something, is entirely natural, given all there is to fear in the world, and that spending time imposing order, even if it produces nothing of practical value, is no cause for shame.
It's courageous, considering her life's work, to contemplate the possibility that putting together a jigsaw puzzle might afford a sense of engagement and companionship not unlike, and not inferior to, what a good novel provides.
The book, according to Drabble, started out as a straightforward history and then evolved into, as she puts it in the book's subtitle, "A Personal History With Jigsaws."
Drabble's novels are insightful, powerfully written, utterly unsentimental and driven by political conviction. They're not revolutionary, but they're rigorous.
She has written a number of nonfiction books, among them biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and edited two editions of "The Oxford Companion to English Literature."
So, Margaret Drabble, august writer and scholar, what is it about jigsaw puzzles?
"The Pattern in the Carpet" is a discursive, loosely organized mix of Drabble's memories -- some but not all of them having to do with solving puzzles -- and her accounts of her own research into the history of jigsaws and other games. The opening chapters are largely devoted to Drabble's childhood puzzle-mate, her Auntie Phyl. Drabble doesn't give us the rollicking old eccentric we'd get from Dickens or Gaskell. Aunt Phyl likes excursions, enjoys lunch in a pub and takes briefly in her old age to an unfortunate girlish hairstyle. But, lacking either the high peculiarity of a Dickens or a Gaskell character, or the inner life of an outwardly ordinary person such as Leopold Bloom or Clarissa Dalloway, Aunt Phyl can feel, disquietingly, like just the sort of limited, uninspiring figure for whom the jigsaw puzzle, indeed the whole notion of "killing time," was devised.
Beginning with Chapter 9, we take what will prove to be intermittent leave of Aunt Phyl and the rest of Drabble's family, and begin to learn a bit about the origins, meaning and mystery of games in general.
I say "mystery" because so many of us love games, and devote considerable time and energy to them, though they generally result in nothing concrete, useful or profitable. In this regard, the jigsaw puzzle is especially mysterious. Most games, after all, involve a battle of wits. But it is, as Drabble points out, the limits of the jigsaw that make it so compelling. "The jigsaw is the very opposite of the novel. The novel is formless and frameless. It has no blueprint, no pattern, no edges." In completing a jigsaw puzzle, you neither excel nor disappoint. You just go on and then, one day, order has been recreated. There's no denying that we as a species are fond of order, whether we create it imperfectly out of nothing (as one does in writing a novel) or re-establish it, piece by piece, perfectly, on the dining room table.
"The Pattern in the Carpet" -- a reference to the Henry James short story "The Figure in the Carpet," in which a celebrated author dies without having conveyed to the world at large the secret idea that links all his books -- rambles a bit as it moves back and forth between Drabble's life and the history of the jigsaw.
One wonders if the book became the hybrid it is in part because the history of the jigsaw puzzle, which began as a tool to teach children geography, is not long or particularly interesting.
Drabble's book does have force and gravity. She uses the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle to assert that life is composed of small undramatic pieces, and not of the cataclysmic events on which some novelists insist. She argues, convincingly, that even in matters of far greater consequence than finishing a jigsaw puzzle, the entire notion of realizing a goal is a useful but romantic delusion, meant to keep us moving through the days.
She writes that our human desire to create order, to solve something, is entirely natural, given all there is to fear in the world, and that spending time imposing order, even if it produces nothing of practical value, is no cause for shame.
It's courageous, considering her life's work, to contemplate the possibility that putting together a jigsaw puzzle might afford a sense of engagement and companionship not unlike, and not inferior to, what a good novel provides.
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