Real People

A frequent theme of Thomas Mann's writing is the dichotomy between the "Kuenstler", or artist, and the "Buerger", a word that can be translated either as "citizen" or "bourgeois". Janet, the central character of this novel, tries to keep a foot in both camps. On the one hand she is Janet Stockwell, the wife of a successful insurance company executive, on the other, she is Janet Belle Smith, moderately successful writer of short stories. (She writes under her maiden name). The novel is set during the two weeks in midsummer which Janet spends at Illyria, a New England stately home. (The story is told in the first person, and is written as though it were being told in Janet's diary). Once the mansion of a wealthy family, Illyria is now, under the terms of the will of its last owner, a colony for creative artists. The name "Illyria" is probably a pun on "Bohemia"- both were former names of counties in Eastern Europe, Croatia and the Czech Republic respectively, and both were used by Shakespeare as settings for plays. Every year, various writers, musicians, painters and sculptors are invited to spend a few weeks or months in the house in order to escape from the pressures of the outside world (what Janet calls "the world of telegrams and anger") and concentrate on their work. Among Janet's fellow-guests at Illyria are Charlie Baxter, a disillusioned Marxist novelist, now a self-destructive alcoholic suffering from poverty, Gerald Glass, a young hippy poet, Nick Donato, a modernist pop-art sculptor from a working-class immigrant New York background, and Leonard Zimmern, an eminent literary critic. The guest Janet is most looking forward to meeting is Kenneth Foster, a more traditionalist artist. Although there has never been any sexual relationship between them, Janet is secretly in love with Kenneth; he is trapped in an unhappy marriage to a drunken and unfaithful wife, and Janet sees him as a kindred spirit, someone who, unlike her husband, understands her creative impulses. Janet has always enjoyed her stays at Illyria in the past, and at first she is happy to be once again in a place she describes as a "small private Eden". (The title "Real People" derives from Janet's theory that at Illyria one becomes one's real self, the person one would be in a decent world). Even in Eden, however, there was a serpent and forbidden fruit, and as Janet's stay progresses she finds quarrels breaking out among the guests and she herself becomes more discontented. (The changing weather seems to reflect Janet's feelings; at first pleasantly warm, it later becomes oppressively hot, with a thunderstorm at the end coinciding with her emotional crisis). The catalyst for much of the discontent is Anna May Mundy, the teenage niece of the administrator of the Illyria foundation. Anna May is an attractive but superficial girl, uninterested in art but fascinated by celebrity, and it is her flirtations with the male guests which are the cause of much of the dissension.

When writers write about writing, the results are usually very interesting. Think of Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night a Traveler", Byatt's "Possession", Roth's "The Ghost Writer", and Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello". Alison Lurie's 1970 novel is right up there with them, to my mind. It's only 146 pages long, but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in elegance and sophistication. Janet 'Belle' Smith - married, early forties, and the author of a well-received collection of short stories - is taking her annual sojourn at Illyria, a New England mansion which has been converted into an invitation-only retreat for artists of all kinds. Craving escape from a deadening home life, Janet is delighted to find her friend Kenneth is on the guest list, but the appearance of the witless waif Anna May and the husky sculptor Nick Donato threaten to disrupt everything. As Janet struggles to construct new stories she is forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about herself, her companions, and the potential fraudulence of her art. Lurie chooses Janet's diary as the narrative device, and it's an excellent choice for a novel which deals with the difference between appearance and reality, between social roles and one's own sense of identity, and in which the protagonist's reflection on these differences is vital. Apart from constructing a neat snapshot of American art in the 1960s, Lurie deftly explores the familiar crisis of female artistry: the competing claims of being a wife/mother and having a creative career which family members more or less refuse to take seriously. But this isn't just about women. It's about the relationship between art and reality. What starts out as a comedy of manners escalates in profundity until it becomes, in the final pages, a concise manifesto on the nature and purpose of art - which turns out to be truth: "If nothing survives of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies."