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Interior Design: Stories
Each of us carries an interior design, a secret personal world where we allow ourselves to explore our most private hopes and fears. In Interior Design, Philip Graham presents a gallery of people who, for all their strangeness, seem deeply, touchingly familiar.
When Bradley's parents die suddenly, he is tormented as much by their absence as he is by the thought that their guardian angels, now reassigned to other people, have taken his parents' secrets with them. Haunted by this disturbing idea, he becomes obsessed with his own angel and lives each day with the belief that someone always jealously hovers at his side, hungry for his every thought.
Elsewhere, a young boy lies awake at night listening to his parents' bitter arguments over his father's struggling shoe business. Huddled under his covers with a flashlight, the boy draws maps of imaginary planets on tennis balls, creating little worlds where his troubled family is somehow always happy.
Mysterious, tender, and sometimes frightening, these stories are fueled by the conviction that what moves us most in our lives are our deepest secrets and that our most intense adventures are the ones we create within ourselves.
When Bradley's parents die suddenly, he is tormented as much by their absence as he is by the thought that their guardian angels, now reassigned to other people, have taken his parents' secrets with them. Haunted by this disturbing idea, he becomes obsessed with his own angel and lives each day with the belief that someone always jealously hovers at his side, hungry for his every thought.
Elsewhere, a young boy lies awake at night listening to his parents' bitter arguments over his father's struggling shoe business. Huddled under his covers with a flashlight, the boy draws maps of imaginary planets on tennis balls, creating little worlds where his troubled family is somehow always happy.
Mysterious, tender, and sometimes frightening, these stories are fueled by the conviction that what moves us most in our lives are our deepest secrets and that our most intense adventures are the ones we create within ourselves.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
Hardcover
First published December 23, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 7, 2021
I'm grappling with how best to put this, because there's some kind of undefinable quality at the center of these stories. It's like trying to read the palm of a hand that is made of fog. There's a curiosity behind the words, but it's like a shy kid peeking around the corner, watching the adult world from their zoomed-out lens - even when the story concerns adults and their intricate passions and loathings. This curiosity lends a real magic to the telling, which is curious, because so much of Graham's writing is focused on the tangible, the physical, the basic elements that make up the fabric of our day-to-day life.
Each one of these eight stories are hymns to a hush. They hum; they dip; they sway; they purse their lips in prayer; they whisper to whatever hovers in the formless dark.
Oddly enough, though Graham often does astounding work incorporating physical, tangible elements in his fiction, focusing on the material world that surrounds us, what these stories ultimately brought to my mind was the philosopher Charles Berkeley's theory of immaterialism, which deals with the inherent unreliability of physical objects. Essentially, that nothing material exists outside of our perceptions of it. If that sentence makes your brain twist, ask yourself the same question Berkeley did. Simply:
Is it possible to conceive of an object existing independently of any perception?
Berkeley's answer to this was that no, it wasn't possible. "Esse est percipi," claimed the man. To be is to be perceived. Empirically, this is all we can know. The things we encounter and perceive are all formed and shaped by our personal experiences.
I don't pretend to understand a lot of the shifting world of philosophy, but what I can glean from the empiricist argument there is that language is a sharing of these experiences, and a tacit agreement between people who share them. And if we look very closely at these agreements, suddenly there are cracks in the similarities. Perhaps when I think of an "apple," I see a green one, and when you think of "apple," you see a red one.
This slow drift where the very basic elements of reality are thrown into question is what lies at the heart of Graham's stories. Language breaks down, assumptions are questioned, and all within the framing of a cultural dialogue. Is your father still your father, if he can no longer provide for the family, no longer has a job? Who, then, does he become, if he is not your father? Is the idea of him as just another man enough for you - and what about for him?
Quiet earthquakes shiver through the prose. For some characters, it's only a tremor, a brief rattling of their china on the walls - for others, the surface of their world cracks apart, and they are utterly transfigured as a result. That's how most of these stories end, too - very rarely is there satisfaction, or even catharsis, unfortunately - these are designed as tunnels underneath the familiar lawns and bedrooms and kitchens, and they weaken the structures above intentionally, to show you what might happen in the wake of collapse.
Most of these are written around similar themes: brief snapshot of families or relationships on the verge of rupture. Anxiety creeps in around the corners, in murmurs of parental dissatisfaction and potential dissolution of the family. One, "Another Planet," is framed via the eyes of the son, watching his shoe-salesman father slowly turn into a Willy Loman-style character, lost to the dust of the past. This story, like many others, was like sipping at a bitter tea, in a cup laced with the sting of nostalgia.
Still others deal with humanity attempting to grapple with what they cannot know: in "Angel," one of my favorites, a child internalizes a priest's story that angels - seraphim and cherubim - only hover near to us because they cannot experience the world as we do. The angels are addicted to us, the priest explains. This takes on horrific dimensions as the protagonist's mother and father are killed in an abrupt accident before his eyes: what if his angel is a jealous angel, he asks himself. "Better be careful," he says, in one of my favorite lines. "God doesn't like irony."
In the title story, Graham really delves into his theme. The protagonist here is someone who is, like some of Graham's other characters, seeking atonement for the avaricious sins of their parent. Because her father, a house builder, would populate his model homes with furniture 3/4 the size of actual furniture, the prospective buyers would feel the space was so much larger than it was. "I thought this was a terrible way to make a living," the narrator tells us, "to ensure that a home grew smaller once a family moved in with their full-sized furniture." Dimensionality, how one occupies a space - even the vast blankness of their spiritual interior - comes front and center, and by the end of the story, there is an eviction, but it is impossible to know whether we are the ones being evicted, or the ones doing the evicting.
"Beauty Marks," halfway through the collection, discusses the collision of a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists and a (from what I can tell) fictional African tribe: the Isono. (Isono, in Zulu, appears to mean "sin," or "offense," which is a telling little clue, I think) The story takes place after the pair have returned from Africa, and are reviewing their notes for the production of a thesis, but Barbara can't stop thinking about the spiritually elaborate scarification rituals; and Martin can't stop thinking about the paths in the fields (that are initially off-limits to him), even as he leaves each night for longer and longer walks through the city. It is in this story that Berkeley's argument comes back to mind, as Berkeley commented that "spirit" is the only thing beyond our perceptions of things - it is the "thing" which does the perceiving - and this story is concerned primarily with the veiled agenda, the movements, of the spirit world, and its conjunction with our own. This story is easily one of my favorites, even though the ending mystifies me slightly: it lands in a liminal place that resists easy interpretation.
"The Pose" deals with memory and the frantic attempts of a woman to recapitulate the past when love appears to have gone stale. But memory is a tricky thing, and identity is even shiftier. This is a minnow-flash of a story, much slighter than the others, but no less potent.
This is followed by "The Reverse," which is a really intriguing study, again, of Fern, who is an actress in a stable relationship with a seemingly blocked musician. Fern finds surprise employment in a strange audition, and is hired by an idiosyncratic, eccentric woman who specializes in conceptual art. As the story unfolds, Fern becomes a symbol for malaise and discontent - but is that symbol really indicative of who she is? The final scene of this haunting story will remain imprinted on my memory for a long time to come. So much heartache in this one, and frustration. It almost reads like a Robert Aickman short story.
"Geology" and "Lucky," the two stories which close out the collection, are of a shared theme. Whereas "Another Planet," which opened, is from the perspective of a young boy, these two are all about aging, and the fear of death, and the ephemerality of anything solid or reliable. In "Geology," we have the depiction of a sudden blossoming of love and shared interest, though it comes from an unexpected place, and as their lives continue and a son enters the picture, suddenly nothing is stable. Though the geologist teaches his lover that nothing is unchangeable, this reality slowly drives him mad, and leads him to an unspeakable act. Again, as in "Interior Design," and in "Beauty Marks," this story ends up in a liminal place, where the reliability of the omniscient narrator has to be questioned as well as the sanity of the protagonist.
In "Lucky," however, we meet an older couple who knows one another so well that the husband can even diagnose the species of his wife's silences. This story is concerned primarily with cessation, and it feels like watching someone take their last, peaceful breaths before they slip away into whatever comes next.
I'm sure I will be thinking about this passel of intricate, multi-layered stories for quite some time. They invite that kind of revisiting. I imagine with every pass I make I will discover some new connection or association between themes or motifs that I hadn't seen on first read, that's how elegant and carefully assembled this collection is.
In the end, too, the thing that strikes me the most is that these stories seem beyond my attempt to explain them - even though I've read the entire thing, I can't help but feeling like there's something eluding me. What I will say: there is an immense amount of sadness in this book, but also ecstasy, which not only refers to sheer, unparalleled bliss, but also the severing of connections to others, sometimes to the point of paralysis. Ecstasy is an indefinable, spiritual, experience, intimately personal on a granular level: when one attempts to describe its, words usually fall miserably short - but not for Graham, and certainly not in these eight wise, terrifying, beautiful stories.
Each one of these eight stories are hymns to a hush. They hum; they dip; they sway; they purse their lips in prayer; they whisper to whatever hovers in the formless dark.
Oddly enough, though Graham often does astounding work incorporating physical, tangible elements in his fiction, focusing on the material world that surrounds us, what these stories ultimately brought to my mind was the philosopher Charles Berkeley's theory of immaterialism, which deals with the inherent unreliability of physical objects. Essentially, that nothing material exists outside of our perceptions of it. If that sentence makes your brain twist, ask yourself the same question Berkeley did. Simply:
Is it possible to conceive of an object existing independently of any perception?
Berkeley's answer to this was that no, it wasn't possible. "Esse est percipi," claimed the man. To be is to be perceived. Empirically, this is all we can know. The things we encounter and perceive are all formed and shaped by our personal experiences.
I don't pretend to understand a lot of the shifting world of philosophy, but what I can glean from the empiricist argument there is that language is a sharing of these experiences, and a tacit agreement between people who share them. And if we look very closely at these agreements, suddenly there are cracks in the similarities. Perhaps when I think of an "apple," I see a green one, and when you think of "apple," you see a red one.
This slow drift where the very basic elements of reality are thrown into question is what lies at the heart of Graham's stories. Language breaks down, assumptions are questioned, and all within the framing of a cultural dialogue. Is your father still your father, if he can no longer provide for the family, no longer has a job? Who, then, does he become, if he is not your father? Is the idea of him as just another man enough for you - and what about for him?
Quiet earthquakes shiver through the prose. For some characters, it's only a tremor, a brief rattling of their china on the walls - for others, the surface of their world cracks apart, and they are utterly transfigured as a result. That's how most of these stories end, too - very rarely is there satisfaction, or even catharsis, unfortunately - these are designed as tunnels underneath the familiar lawns and bedrooms and kitchens, and they weaken the structures above intentionally, to show you what might happen in the wake of collapse.
Most of these are written around similar themes: brief snapshot of families or relationships on the verge of rupture. Anxiety creeps in around the corners, in murmurs of parental dissatisfaction and potential dissolution of the family. One, "Another Planet," is framed via the eyes of the son, watching his shoe-salesman father slowly turn into a Willy Loman-style character, lost to the dust of the past. This story, like many others, was like sipping at a bitter tea, in a cup laced with the sting of nostalgia.
Still others deal with humanity attempting to grapple with what they cannot know: in "Angel," one of my favorites, a child internalizes a priest's story that angels - seraphim and cherubim - only hover near to us because they cannot experience the world as we do. The angels are addicted to us, the priest explains. This takes on horrific dimensions as the protagonist's mother and father are killed in an abrupt accident before his eyes: what if his angel is a jealous angel, he asks himself. "Better be careful," he says, in one of my favorite lines. "God doesn't like irony."
In the title story, Graham really delves into his theme. The protagonist here is someone who is, like some of Graham's other characters, seeking atonement for the avaricious sins of their parent. Because her father, a house builder, would populate his model homes with furniture 3/4 the size of actual furniture, the prospective buyers would feel the space was so much larger than it was. "I thought this was a terrible way to make a living," the narrator tells us, "to ensure that a home grew smaller once a family moved in with their full-sized furniture." Dimensionality, how one occupies a space - even the vast blankness of their spiritual interior - comes front and center, and by the end of the story, there is an eviction, but it is impossible to know whether we are the ones being evicted, or the ones doing the evicting.
"Beauty Marks," halfway through the collection, discusses the collision of a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists and a (from what I can tell) fictional African tribe: the Isono. (Isono, in Zulu, appears to mean "sin," or "offense," which is a telling little clue, I think) The story takes place after the pair have returned from Africa, and are reviewing their notes for the production of a thesis, but Barbara can't stop thinking about the spiritually elaborate scarification rituals; and Martin can't stop thinking about the paths in the fields (that are initially off-limits to him), even as he leaves each night for longer and longer walks through the city. It is in this story that Berkeley's argument comes back to mind, as Berkeley commented that "spirit" is the only thing beyond our perceptions of things - it is the "thing" which does the perceiving - and this story is concerned primarily with the veiled agenda, the movements, of the spirit world, and its conjunction with our own. This story is easily one of my favorites, even though the ending mystifies me slightly: it lands in a liminal place that resists easy interpretation.
"The Pose" deals with memory and the frantic attempts of a woman to recapitulate the past when love appears to have gone stale. But memory is a tricky thing, and identity is even shiftier. This is a minnow-flash of a story, much slighter than the others, but no less potent.
This is followed by "The Reverse," which is a really intriguing study, again, of Fern, who is an actress in a stable relationship with a seemingly blocked musician. Fern finds surprise employment in a strange audition, and is hired by an idiosyncratic, eccentric woman who specializes in conceptual art. As the story unfolds, Fern becomes a symbol for malaise and discontent - but is that symbol really indicative of who she is? The final scene of this haunting story will remain imprinted on my memory for a long time to come. So much heartache in this one, and frustration. It almost reads like a Robert Aickman short story.
"Geology" and "Lucky," the two stories which close out the collection, are of a shared theme. Whereas "Another Planet," which opened, is from the perspective of a young boy, these two are all about aging, and the fear of death, and the ephemerality of anything solid or reliable. In "Geology," we have the depiction of a sudden blossoming of love and shared interest, though it comes from an unexpected place, and as their lives continue and a son enters the picture, suddenly nothing is stable. Though the geologist teaches his lover that nothing is unchangeable, this reality slowly drives him mad, and leads him to an unspeakable act. Again, as in "Interior Design," and in "Beauty Marks," this story ends up in a liminal place, where the reliability of the omniscient narrator has to be questioned as well as the sanity of the protagonist.
In "Lucky," however, we meet an older couple who knows one another so well that the husband can even diagnose the species of his wife's silences. This story is concerned primarily with cessation, and it feels like watching someone take their last, peaceful breaths before they slip away into whatever comes next.
I'm sure I will be thinking about this passel of intricate, multi-layered stories for quite some time. They invite that kind of revisiting. I imagine with every pass I make I will discover some new connection or association between themes or motifs that I hadn't seen on first read, that's how elegant and carefully assembled this collection is.
In the end, too, the thing that strikes me the most is that these stories seem beyond my attempt to explain them - even though I've read the entire thing, I can't help but feeling like there's something eluding me. What I will say: there is an immense amount of sadness in this book, but also ecstasy, which not only refers to sheer, unparalleled bliss, but also the severing of connections to others, sometimes to the point of paralysis. Ecstasy is an indefinable, spiritual, experience, intimately personal on a granular level: when one attempts to describe its, words usually fall miserably short - but not for Graham, and certainly not in these eight wise, terrifying, beautiful stories.
August 27, 2009
A beautifully written collection of short stories... If you enjoy reading the kind of fiction that finds depth in the familiar and is full of the hidden meaning of symbolism, and fiction that is short, yet conveys worlds of meaning, this is the book for you.
Read
September 29, 2021Suggesting a dream-like setting, it shows how each human being has its own boundary and restriction tied to him/herself. Though sometimes a person tries to unbound him/herself from these constrains, he/she may not be able to do so because there are factors that that has been imposed on him very deeply.
October 1, 2021
I read only one of the short stories called "interior Design" for a university assignment.
I found the story captivating, symbolic and brilliant.
The writing is also amazing.
I found the story captivating, symbolic and brilliant.
The writing is also amazing.
June 14, 2014
The stories in this book seem to come out of a literary Twilight Zone where people live on faceless side streets in towns that exist outside of history. Graham's his real interest is what goes on inside the head. Society itself, not so much. The first story, with its tinkerer father-in-the basement theme, reminds me immediately of Sherwood Anderson, a tougher more complex Anderson, yes, but you can’t read it and not think of “The Egg.” All of the stories seem to have this kind of a theme, people lost in their own obsessions and ultimimately unable to communicate with others. The best is “Angel,” originally in the Missouri Review, a Ray Bradbury evoking tale of a boy obsessed by his own guardian Angel, and it is worth the price of the book.
“Interior Designs” is for the connoisseur, and especially for writers who likes to study other writers in hopes of discovering how things work
“Interior Designs” is for the connoisseur, and especially for writers who likes to study other writers in hopes of discovering how things work
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews