The Remains of the Day
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Knopf, 245 pages, $18.95
Ordinary Time
By A. G. Mojtabai
Doubleday, 223 pages, $17.95
Early in ”The Remains of the Day,” a perfectionist British butler who is the novel`s main character pauses during an auto excursion to look at the rolling English countryside from the top of a hill and reflect on what makes its beauty unique. ”I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets our land apart,” he concludes.
The same might be said about the two books under review, which could be called doughnut novels because they`re about people whose lives have a hole in the center-lives whose meaning is defined by events that do not occur. In such books, when they work as well as these two, little or nothing happens on the surface, but a great deal happens-and very suspensefully-in the interior spaces where people live.
Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan and raised in Britain, has created in the butler Stevens not only the consummate imperial Englishman on the eve of extinction but also a subversive and oddly loving psychological profile of England just past its peak of greatness. We meet Stevens, who is about as old as the century, in July, 1956, when he has been running Darlington House, one of Britain`s noble homes, for approximately a generation. Lord Darlington having recently died, the house now belongs to ”an American gentleman” who makes the unexpected suggestion that his dedicated servant take a week off for an auto trip in Lord Darlington`s splendidly antique Ford.
Stevens literally has no private life, and it takes him a week just to accept the fact of his holiday by reconceiving it as a business trip: the house is short of skilled domestic help owing to reduced circumstances, and a letter from the former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, hints that she might be willing to return now that her marriage has failed. Stevens will make a leisurely motor trip to her distant home and investigate this possibility. The book is his diary of the journey, which we gradually discover-just ahead of Stevens himself-to be really a pilgrimage aimed at reclaiming a lost love.
Rarely has the device of an unreliable narrator worked such character revelation as it does here. Stevens is a thoughtful, intelligent but not introspective man much given to reflecting on the ideals and standards of his profession, and it is only through his expression of these that we realize how completely he has invested his emotional life in his job and in his devotion to Lord Darlington. For example, he first defines the huge hole in the center of his life-his long-ago loss of Miss Kenton and his wish to have her back-as ”a defect in the staff plan” of Darlington House. He has turned himself inside out like a glove: he can express his needs only as the needs of the house.
People who turn themselves inside out wear their hearts on their sleeves, visible to everyone but them. So as he gets closer to seeing Miss Kenton again after 20 years, he circles back on his memories of her and of his life in Darlington House, and we hear him tell us things he doesn`t know he`s letting slip: of his frozen, unwilling rejections of her; of his cold and vengeful treatment of his dying father; of the incompetence and bigotry of his venerated master, who had been an idealistic but influential dabbler in the nation`s foreign policy just before the Munich agreement with Hitler.
Only toward the end of the book does his incipient understanding that he`s thrown away his life break through the bland, controlled prose.
And only once does he admit to feeling anything at all, when he says that ”my heart was breaking” as he recommited in the present the same inadvertent crime of the heart against Miss Kenton that he had decades before. ”The Remains of the Day” (the title puns on ”remainder” and
”remains,” as in corpse) is an ineffably sad and beautiful piece of work-a tragedy in the form of a comedy of manners.
In her new novel, A. G. Mojtabai returns to territory she scouted a few years ago in her nonfiction book ”Blessed Assurance,” which was about the intersection of apocalyptic religion with Armageddon technology in Armadillo, Tex., where they assemble hydrogen bombs. She told us then that she wanted to test her own rather ”complacent” estrangement from the modern world in a place where both hope and hopelessness were reinforced by the daily presence of The Bomb.
She was also fascinated by the belief in personal immunity from harm-from the bomb or anything else-that she encountered among Pentecostal Christians there. In ”Ordinary Time” she focuses on ordinary faith, which carries no such guarantee but sometimes functions, even without benefit of clergy, to get ordinary people through their days and nights.
The town of Durance (as in endurance) in northwest Texas is the kind of place where people stop to refuel before moving on, and then stay a lifetime for no good reason. Val, a violent, amnesic drifter, is attracted by its apparent emptiness-an absence of people that will let him recover his memory. Around him soon cluster a group of small-town types, each of whom brings to Val a cluster of expectations about what his appearance means for their future.
The novel shifts expertly among their points of view, which include those of Henrietta, who hires Val for her restaurant and has spent years rolling from man to man and from faith to faith; of Cleat, a near-autistic teenage foundling; and of Father Gilvary, an aging priest nearly bereft of
congregation, who in the course of the book becomes legally blind and spiritually clearsighted.
Mojtabai deliberately makes less of this situation than she might have in order to make her quiet point that faith in life can survive even the bleakest terrain without the aid of messiahs like Val, who invariably turn out to be slouching toward some bedlam or other.
That the vision of its author, who is Jewish, owes a great deal to the influence of Flannery O`Connor emerges as much from the book`s unobtrusive lyricism as from its epigraph, which defines ”ordinary time” as the 33 or 34 weeks of the liturgical year ”which celebrate no particular aspect of the mystery of Christ. Instead . . . the mystery of Christ in all its fullness is celebrated.”
It`s hard to praise this book as much as it deserves without underplaying its considerable virtues. Like ”The Remains of the Day,” it will haunt the reader long after books full of sound and fury are forgotten.
