An introduction to the 2013 ebook edition of Interior Design

by Roy Kesey

“The actual tragedies of life,” says Jean Cocteau, “bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.”

That quote, from the Rosamond Lehmann translation of Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles, is so perfectly apposite to my intentions here that I almost wonder if I made it up. Philip Graham’s short story collection Interior Design, first published by Scribner and Sons in 1996, has long deserved a new edition. There are many reasons why this is so, but here are three of the biggest: its bewildering simplicity, its grand design, and the element of the bizarre that inheres in it.

Graham has worn multiple hats the past few decades: travel writer and satirist, memoirist and book reviewer; university professor and magazine editor. I would argue, however, that it is his output in fiction broadly defined—his two short story collections, his novel, his prose poetry—that are most fundamental to us as readers.

Interior Design is in fact the most recent fiction of Graham’s long career. First came The Vanishings, a collection of prose poems published by Release Press in 1978. Next came his debut story collection, The Art of the Knock, put out by William Morrow in 1985; it included stories first seen in The New Yorker and The Washington Post Magazine, among other venues. Graham followed that up with his debut novel How to Read an Unwritten Language, put out by Scribner in 1995 and nominated for the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

While Interior Design has features that will be familiar to readers of Graham’s earlier fiction, many of its stories grow on bones he first unearthed in the course of developing his nonfiction work. Together with his wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, Graham has written two memoirs addressing their years of research and life in West Africa: Parallel Worlds, published by Crown in 1993, and Braided Worlds, published by University of Chicago Press in 2012. These two books also bookend The Moon Come to Earth, a memoir of Graham’s year with his family in Lisbon, first documented in the series of dispatches he wrote for the literary website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and subsequently expanded for print publication by University of Chicago Press in 2009.

Several of the strongest stories in Interior Design apply Graham’s anthropological insights and techniques to the raw material of American life as it was lived near the end of the past millennium. An interesting set of insights into this process is provided by Robin Hemley’s Turning Life into Fiction (Graywolf Press, 2006). As Hemley notes, Graham’s years among the Beng minority in Côte d’Ivoire provided him with a means of defamiliarizing himself with the cultures of his Brooklyn birth and Midwestern adulthood. Just as importantly, given what Graham had learned abroad, strange new fictional amalgams were possible upon his return. In the story “Angel,” for example, the Beng understanding of the afterlife overlays the American workaday world so as to address eternal issues of grief. In the title story, meanwhile, one aspect of the Beng sense of communal space is made manifest to an American architect’s daughter, thus allowing Graham to explore domestic isolation more deeply than might otherwise be possible.

Graham the traveler is of course also Graham the artist. The characters in his stories must by needs come to terms with the oddnesses of contemporary existence, and in so doing, they often draw upon the same set of techniques—for example, the search for patterns to which worthwhile meaning can be assigned—that an author uses to create stories in the first place. As the main character of “Angel” posits, “Maybe we’re compositions, evolving works of art for angels, and they’re attracted to the elegant patterns they make of our fates.” This notion makes all of the characters artists in a sense; it is creativity, then, that will see them through to grace.

The collection begins with “Another Planet,” wherein a young boy spends his days creating make-believe continents, drawing them on the surfaces of tennis balls, seeking a space where familial happiness is possible, even as he looks past these tiny spheres at the sight of his father going to pieces. The theme of watching over continues into the second story, the aforementioned “Angel,” which won the 1992 William Peden Prize, and was included in the tenth annual edition of the anthology The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Here, a boy is obsessed with the notion of guardian angels, an obsession that only grows deeper and more strange following the death of his parents.

The collection’s title story makes active use of the most straightforward reading of the book’s title, the notion of someone who will arrange our furniture in such a way as to better our lives. However there is nothing normal about the main character’s approach to her job: Josephine seeks to decorate her clients’ homes using the materials of their very dreamworlds. Meanwhile, in her personal life, she is dating a man who has no dreams. She attempts to build them for him, but soon realizes that building an exterior from one’s interior means that there is no escape from either.

There are three stories that make active use of Graham’s scientific bent. The first is “Beauty Marks,” wherein a young husband and wife are both drawn and bound by the consequences of what they learn in the course of their anthropological research. “Geology,” meanwhile, features a woman obsessed with melding her own features with that of her husband so as to perfectly imagine the face of her unborn child. Lastly, in “The Pose,” an unemployed factory worker builds a fetish object, a talisman, a human body, out of spare wire; he then dresses it with his wife’s clothes, not knowing that his wife is complicit in the act, hoping that somehow it will bring them back together.

“The Reverse,” perhaps my favorite story in the collection, deserves a paragraph of its own. In it, a small-time actress named Fern takes a gig starring in an increasingly bizarre series of television commercials for cleaning products. At home, the songs her husband writes become more and more jingle-like; the producer, Marjorie, becomes more and more seductive. It isn’t until the end that Fern realizes why she was cast. At that same moment, she sees that she’s been doing good work, but not at all the work she thought she was doing, which is freeing in its own way: “She presses the button again and again, and when the elevator finally arrives with a silky whoosh, its door slides open like a curtain and Fern steps in.”

This brings us to the collection’s final story, “Lucky,” wherein the aging owner of a men’s store has rituals of his own, mainly involving the commonplace phrases he whispers to his customers, meant to ward off the fact that so many of them are passing away of old age. Strange as the character comes to seem to himself, he is the key that brings the whole collection into its own, centered as it is on the notion that there is always something worth holding on for, something born in the interstice between fate and the qualities that keep us human, in this case generosity: “(H)ere it comes and it’s better than money, it’s good luck, maybe even a new life, and I’ll say the number you’re waiting for, see?—I won’t keep it, I’ll give it to you, it’s yours, not mine.”

In each of the stories in this collection, ritual is invoked: to bring sense to the past, or meaning to the present, or some sense of control for the future. Workaday objects and processes are recast in powerful talismanic light. The defamiliarized gaze of the foreigner and the power of the creative mind are brought to bear, and experience is reformed, reshaped, understood newly. The line between what is real and what is imagined is blurred intentionally with the goal of letting events slide from one side of the line to the other according to the needs of a given psyche. These are the services Philip Graham has rendered us over the past several decades, services of which we are ever more in need. How good it is at last to have this new edition of Interior Design in hand.