The Wall Street Journal - 04.04.2020 - 05.04.2020

D4| Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

A

CROSS THEcountry,
coronavirus-related
lockdowns are nar-
rowing our physical
worlds, confining
most of us to home. But we can
still find escape and respite in
reading: expanding our sense of
what is possible even as day-to-day
life contracts. Few novels capture
that surge of possibilities quite like
E.M. Forster’s 1908 “A Room with a
View” (adapted into a 1985 Mer-
chant Ivory film). The story of the
Italian sojourn of spirited naif Lucy
Honeychurch, who travels to Flor-
ence with her neurotic spinster
chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, it’s
at once a wry comedy of British
manners and a timely meditation
on fate: No matter what we think
life has in store for us, Forster tells
us, we may find the seemingly des-
tined path we take far stranger, and
sometimes far better.
Lucy and Charlotte come to Flor-
ence anticipating the traditional
Grand Tour experience straight out
of their well-thumbed Baedeker
guides. But their plans are swiftly
forestalled. They initially fail to get
the titular “room with a view” of
the picturesque Arno River, con-
signed instead to less-than-desir-
able chambers elsewhere in the
Pensione Bertoli. Their companions
in the Pensione—the clergyman Mr.
Beebe, the loquacious romance nov-
elist Miss Lavish, and the philo-
sophically inclined Mr. Emerson—
are suspiciously unorthodox. Lucy’s
starry dreams of Florentine beauty
give way to the reality of life as one
of hundreds of tourists. And—worst
of all—Lucy finds herself falling for
Mr. Emerson’s son, the brooding,
socially undesirable George.
Moving between sunny, free-
spirited Tuscany and the drearily
conventional drawing rooms of
Lucy’s native Surrey, “A Room with
a View” is love story that nods to
human foolishness. Forster is both
sporting and sympathetic: We
might start out comically blind to
what we really need, he hints, but
we’ll likely muddle through to real-
ization, sooner or later. Lucy defies
propriety and status and ends up
with true love and a revelation. “I
want more independence,” she
says, toward’s the novel’s close, and
she gets it.

BYTARAISABELLABURTON

F. MARTIN RAMIN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (BOOK); MATTHEW COOK (ILLUSTRATIONS)

I revisit the workof the

playwrights August Wilson,

Alice Childress, Wendy Was-

serstein, Lillian Hellman and

Adrienne Kennedy. You can

read them together with

your family—it’s a way to

keep the communal aspects

of theater. I’ve also been lis-

tening to podcasts: Brooklyn

Deep’s “School Colors” fol-

lows the fight for desegrega-

tion in Bedford-Stuyvesant;

“Slow Burn: Tupac and Big-

gie” looks at the lives of two

seminal rappers as they con-

verged and ended tragically.

What’s Your Favorite Transporting Read or Podcast?

We asked a playwright, a radio host and a novelist how they escape in these constricting times

POP THE QUESTION

The book takes place in the heart

of the Edwardian era: a transi-

tional period between the regi-

mented conservatism of the

Victorian era and the free-

wheeling ’20s. That transition

manifested in fashion as well.

Women’s clothing—what

Lucy or Charlotte would have

worn—was still somewhat

restrictive (and reliant on

corsets), but the ex-

aggerated hourglass

figure had given way

to the “S-curve”: a slim-

mer fit at the sides and a

padded bustle to extend the wearer’s

derrière outward. It’s unclear, though,

if that silhouette defined a “cerise

dress” that Lucy wears to ill effect.

“Her new cerise dress is a fail-

ure, and makes her look taw-

dry and wan,” notes the nar-

rator. That said, the book’s

most famous “outfit” is

nothing at all—witnessed

by Lucy when she stumbles

on a gentlemen’s “bathing

party.” It’s one of many steps

on Lucy’s journey to personal

freedom. The Garden of

Eden, Mr. Emerson tells us

is, “really yet to come. We

shall enter it when we no

longer despise our bodies.”

Forster has an eye for in-

teriors, using them to cre-

ate a sense not just of

place but of characters

who live in them. The

shabby but panoramic and fan-

ciful room at the Pensione—which

Lucy and Charlotte finally secure

through the Emersons’ interven-

tion—is a “a bright bare room, with

a floor of red tiles which look clean

though they are not; with a

painted ceiling whereon pink grif-

fins and blue amorini sport in a for-

est of yellow violins and bassoons.”

Meanwhile, the first thing we learn

about Lucy’s restrictive childhood

home in England, Windy Corner

(shown above), is that her mother

has drawn the curtains to block

out as much light as possible: “for

the carpet was new and deserved

protection from the August sun.”

DESIGN

Italian pensions

and English

drawing rooms

FASHION

Padded bustles and

ill-chosen dresses

READING & RETREATING

Lucy’s coming-of-age story also

depicts Europe on the brink of

rapid change: political, cultural,

and technological. In one memo-

rable chapter, Lucy and her com-

panions head out to the Italian

countryside by horse-drawn car-

riage. Forster jokingly refers to

the Italian driver as “Phaeton”

and his sister as “Persephone”—

a reference to Greek gods—to

imply that they belong to a van-

ished and mythical world, one

“Neither the Ages of Faith nor

the Age of Doubt had touched.”

Meanwhile, in London, carriages

have given way to new motor-

cars. Invented in 1886, the mo-

torcar had become widely popu-

lar by the novel’s publication

though it appears only fleetingly

in the book, perhaps just a little

too modern for the Honey-

churches, or Forster himself.

Not even Forster’s dry wit can

dampen his love for Italy. His

descriptions of Florence at once

poke fun at Lucy’s schoolgirl ex-

pectations and celebrate a

quintessentially Italian form of

chaos, namely the spontaneity

of experience. When Lucy first

visits the Santa Croce church

she is overwhelmed at having

forgotten her Baedeker guide-

book: “It must be a wonderful

building,” Lucy frets, “But how

like a barn! And how very cold!”

Before long, “the pernicious

charm of Italy” starts to take

hold of Lucy. Moments before

George first kisses her on a

country outing, Lucy succumbs

first to the Florentine land-

scape. “Light and beauty envel-

oped her. She had fallen on to a

little open terrace, which was

covered with violets from end

to end.” Despite Forster’s gener-

ally droll tone, passages like

these help us live vicariously—

at least briefly—in the Italy of

our imagination.

LOCALES

An Italian dreamscape

TECHNOLOGY

Wheeling around

My go-to podcastis “99% In-

visible” about design, because

of its expansive reach: There’s

an episode about who really

wrote “Who Let the Dogs

Out!” It’s so funny. As is the

very smart “Conan O’Brien

Needs a Friend” series. The

quirky “Everything is Alive” has

inanimate objects like “Louis,

the Can of Off-Brand Cola”

and “Scott, the Stethoscope”

tell their life stories. And I lose

myself in egg-heady audio

books like “Against the Grain,”

an agricultural deep dive into

the rise of states.

‘Bel Canto’ byAnn Patchett

comes to mind, though it’s

about entrapment! Still, there’s

wonderful tension and a great

love story within the confines

of a South American mansion.

Now we have time to dig in to

meaty books like “Independent

People” by Halldór Laxness,

set in Iceland. “Unaccustomed

Earth” by Jhumpa Lahiri is

powerful, as is “Disgrace” by

J.M. Coetzee, about the ethical

and generational divides in

post-apartheid South Africa.

—Edited from interviews

by Donna Bulseco

Lynn Nottage

Pulitzer Prize-winning

playwright, whose opera

‘Intimate Apparel’ opens this

fall at Lincoln Center Theater

Lily King

Author of five novels, including

the new ‘Writers & Lovers’

Evan Kleiman

Host of the radio show and

podcast ‘Good Food’ on NPR

member station KCRW

An Edwardian Escape

COMFORT READS

Though Florence is known for

some of Italy’s best cuisine,

Forster pays little attention to

it, which means you won’t be

salivating too forlornly while

reading “A Room With a View.”

And when he does acknowl-

edge food, he’s fairly savage.

Charlotte bemoans the fact

that the meat in the Pensione

Bertoli has “surely been used

for soup,” while Lucy has the

misfortune of buying “some

hot chestnut paste out of a lit-

tle shop, because it looked so

typical,” only to find that it

“tasted partly of the paper in

which it was wrapped, partly

of hair oil, partly of the great

unknown.” Forster’s characters,

typically English, show far

moreinterestinteathan

meals—going so far as to at-

tempt to have a tea-party at a

Florentine Renaissance villa.

FOOD

TeaeveninTuscany

Strange days call for familiar tales. In this new series, we revisit beloved

books that offer succor—and deconstruct their most Off Duty-ish aspects.

Up first, E.M. Forster’s 1908 tale of a life-affirming, fateful grand tour