Notes on A Bistro of One's Own

"The best house, everybody had said, in central London–large, elegant, almost secluded at the end of a quiet Kensington square. Caroline had spent three years and God knows how much money decorating it until it had reached that state of mannered perfection which made the disorder of normal daily life unthinkable." – Peter Maybe, from Hotel Pastis







June 27

Well now to plan out a novel...let's see, first and foremost you must pick out a few things, a little like a wish list, I suspect. There are those people that you decide to characterize for the next year or so – you can't forget that you will have exhibit both patience and some generosity if you plan to wake up in the morning to say hello to them over and over again. And let's not forget about voice and tone – better pick out the right textures there also. Who wants to write a dark tragedy when the soul is actually crying out for some humor? Action, point of view, context...what point are you trying to make? With all of this, I know from the past that I might of course crave the contours of a social novel – reading Kingsolver right now, Flight Behavior, which is a take off on the Scarlett Letter, the social novel of that century – or that a farce would be fun, but at the end of the day, I really can't stand living inside the grind of either radical departure of all things gloomy or all things hilarious. I've gravitated toward the writing of Mayle ever since A Year in Provence, probably the most important book I've ever really read because it captures something of the spirit of things that I share – it's a sort of desire for lightness against the usual norms we set out for ourselves of the serious. To put it another way, I tend to spend my days listening to smooth jazz, all the while the Wisconsin weather trapping around the neighborhood a little like a fiend, literally. I think Mayle (now so sadly passed, as of 2018), was very much a recipient of the same inner genetic tendency to see need to see bright colors and smell the wafts of the baguette carried along the waves of the Mistral, despite (and against) a British backdrop of a previous life. Let's not forget that to take the broad leap across the pond and shuck the Brits for the Provencial is really quite a step. Yet Maybe does a wonderful job of not turning his past life as ad exec into some trap of cultural mores and psychic disenchantment; instead it always receives a humorous past, as if to say, yes, I was indeed trapped inside poor weather and poor hours for many years, but this great escape is not necessarily something to be found only in the Provencale sunshine, but something to be rebound inside my very own voice and perceptions. His plots are relatively loose and his little sly criminals full of human humor, just like us. These are light and full of watercolors, not deep green and brown Dutch Masters. Of all the literature I have read, Mayle is the only writer I have ever fully depended on and understood, over and over again. An old friend...seemingly – my own fault here – my only friend, really in this way. To be a romantic in a world gone either mechanical or digital is close to a full time job. How do you do it? You can listen to smooth jazz; you can cook it out; you can write it out; or maybe live it out if you are extraordinarily nimble in the matters of balancing real life with that of the fantastic.