Your story “The Particles of Order” is set in the English countryside, in Devon, in the home of a late writer of murder mysteries which is now a holiday rental. When did you start thinking about the cottage as a suitable setting for a story? Did you want to use any elements of the murder-mystery genre—do you want a reader to imagine that there may be a murderer or a victim in the ensuing pages?
A picturesque cottage in the English countryside where many murder mysteries were written, a seemingly unremarkable caretaker who pays close attention to details, a single guest checking in for an extensive stay off-season—I did start the story with these disquieting elements, thinking that there might be a murder. In fact, I imagined the murder to some extent but soon realized that I could not make up my mind whether it would or should happen.
I am a middling reader of murder mysteries. I read Agatha Christie, P. D. James, Dorothy L. Sayers, Colin Dexter, and some others in a passive manner. I accept the contract that a murder (or more than one) will happen and the author will resolve the mystery, and I read without any intellectual participation. With this story, the fact that I could not offer that contract became important, since I would have to write the story to figure out my ambivalence and the story’s ambivalence.
The story is told chiefly from the perspective of Ursula, the caretaker, who was Edmund Thornton’s typist for many years. She’s curious about the latest guest, a woman named Lilian Pang who has travelled from the United States but knows nothing about Thornton’s work. Did you know from the outset that the conversations between these two women would form the heart of the story?
I did not foresee that so much of the story would be the conversations between the two women. Ursula has lived in the same place—both physically, in Devon, and emotionally, in Thornton’s work—for years, so her existence is part of the story’s setting. And then we have Lilian, “an Asian woman from that faraway place called New Jersey,” who intrudes on Ursula’s world, bringing a feeling of unfamiliarity and interruption.
They are both avid readers—and writers—who spend much of their time talking with themselves. At one point Ursula reflects: “Odd women tended to exist in parallel. An encounter between two such specimens should not be avoided.” And that encounter is their conversation.
As Thornton’s typist, how well would Ursula have known him? How intimate a relationship is that? It becomes clear that she loved him for many years. In the course of the story, she starts to suspect that he may have known this. Do you think he did?
Ursula’s relationship with Thornton is her relationship with him and his work. We get a sense from how she talks about Thornton’s beliefs and philosophy that the two of them discussed many topics over the years. The intimacy between their minds was probably much closer than Ursula is willing to reveal—even to herself. In the meantime, the well-maintained boundary between them gave their relationship an external aloofness, which might have made their intellectual closeness possible. All those minor changes Ursula introduced into Thornton’s work—I think he did understand. Both characters feel to me as though they stepped out of a quintessential William Trevor story (“The Printmaker” is one that comes to mind), and, of course, Ursula’s statement that she lives in a William Trevor story would corroborate our conjectures.
The women, as you say, move from discussing Thornton’s work to that of William Trevor. He had a house in the Devon countryside, too. You’ve often talked about how influential a writer—and a person—he has been for you and said that you like to imagine your stories in conversation with his. Were you thinking of any of Trevor’s stories in particular when you were writing “The Particles of Order”?
I have written before about William Trevor’s influence and my friendship with him. But I knew from the beginning that this story was not a conversation with a particular Trevor story. The story I had in mind was Patricia Highsmith’s “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World,” which I read for the fiction podcast and discussed with Deborah Treisman a few years ago. That story is set in an English cottage and is about a dying woman and a visiting nurse. The impending death strips away the husk or fluff of life, and the encounter between the two women is at a heightened level of consciousness.
It was William Trevor who introduced Highsmith’s work to me, and I thought it would be a good homage to him to make Highsmith’s story a potential conversational partner with my story. I should also add that I consciously gave the opening paragraph and the ending paragraph a Trevoresque feeling—from the images to the cadence of the language, so the story is still in conversation with his work, albeit in a slanted manner.
Lilian tells Ursula that she feels as though she’s been “evicted from Trevor-land,” and she goes on to explain that she is the mother of two sons, who have both died by suicide. It’s a devastating moment in the story. You have suffered the same devastating loss. How important was it to you to write about this in your fiction? Is the conversation between Ursula and Lilian one that you could have in life or only in fiction?
Lilian’s statement that she’s “evicted from Trevor-land” is close to how I feel at times. But what happens after the eviction? A stanza from a Wallace Stevens poem has been on my mind recently.
This is the first story I wrote after my husband and I lost our younger son, James. As is the case with a previous story, “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” which I wrote after we lost our older son, Vincent, I consider writing these stories the practice to speak humanly from the height or from the depth of experience. So it is important—and imperative—to tackle my life in fiction.
I suppose that, in general, people avoid talking too intensely or too acutely. I have always liked Elizabeth Bowen’s defense of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which she made after some readers had objected that “English people of this kind do not talk like this,” referring to Compton-Burnett’s characters. “No, but they feel like this,” Bowen observed, adding that Compton-Burnett “deliberately jacks her characters up on to a higher level of consciousness, and of articulateness, than the equivalent persons would have in real life.”
The conversation between Ursula and Lilian is, oddly, very much like the conversations I have had with close friends in the past few months, so I would like to believe that when life takes away the capacity for small talk and empty words, such a conversation is possible.
Have you had to endure the same kind of responses from strangers that Lilian describes?
In the story, Ursula reflects that “very few deaths could remain private,” which is the situation I faced, too. I did give my own experience of hearing from strangers and being made the center of some kind of scandal to Lilian. All these reactions were inevitable, as Lilian implies in the story, but I thought the story must push beyond the simple point of inevitability. When Lilian observes that a writer of murder mysteries and an Internet troll share something, I felt a moment of chill, in the same way I felt that, although neither Lilian nor Ursula is a murderer, Ursula can imagine them both in such a role. Whether a murder happens or not, by then, does not matter. Lilian and Ursula have come to a dark understanding of the porousness between reality and unreality; the line between fiction and life is blurred for them both.
At one point, Ursula asks herself, “Where could Lilian go? Into a Greek drama or a Shakespeare play?” Is the story a way of coming up with a possible answer?
Ursula’s question for Lilian is a question I have been asking myself in the past few months, along with another question: Where do I go in my writing? So, yes, writing the story is offering the possibility of an answer: one goes on writing stories with the hope that they can be part of the acutest speech. ♦
