Faith Sullivan says of her
latest novel, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse,
published in October, “It has no plot, no dramatic arc like you’re
supposed to have….It’s just about how we live.”
The novel’s narrator, Nell Stillman charts how
she lives through six decades in the small midwestern town of Harvester,
knitting quotidian pleasures and challenges with tragic events and major
changes of the 20th century.
Throughout it all, Nell maintains a steady presence, comforted by her
love of reading—especially books by P.G. Wodehouse.
At the book’s opening in 1900, Nell has been
left a young widow with a toddler son, Hilly; penniless, she tries to tamp down
panic. Soon, Juliet and Laurence Lundren, an influential couple in the town and
the first of many “angels” to appear in Nell’s life, help her procure a job as
a third-grade teacher. The position gives Nell a solid position in the
community, as well as a modest income. The couple’s intervention is the first
of many examples of “the kindness of strangers” that mark Nell’s life, eventually
deepening her circle of support and friendship.
But this is no saccharine tale and Nell is no
beatific heroine. Small-minded townspeople judge and sometimes threaten her
(the school board tries to fire her because of guilt by association—her baby
sitter leaves town suddenly, and everyone assumes that she is pregnant). And
Nell is shattered when her beloved son Hilly returns from World War I
shell-shocked and broken. Throughout the years, through vicissitudes and small
joys, Nell just keeps on—and finds solace in reading Wodehouse.
Mr. Wodehouse,
it turned out, was an entirely new experience. He was delicious, lighter than
air. Generous to a fault. He made her laugh as no man ever had. Surely, he
wrote only for her. His rhythms, the way his wit kissed a phrase and sent it
dancing—these armed her like the summer. She laughed aloud and fell in love
again and again.
This linchpin of the novel was the hardest
aspect for me to relate to—I’ve never been a Wodehouse fan, as Sullivan clearly
is: she reports having read his novels for 40 years and having re-read many of
them during the writing of her own novel. But never mind. You don’t have to
love Wodehouse—you will come to love Nell Stillman.
In contrast to much of contemporary “high
concept” fiction, Good Night Mr. Wodehouse
is linear, a quiet story that features an entirely reliable narrator, one whose
moral compass anchors the story. To stick with a central character for more
than six decades, you have to like that person. And who could not like Nell? She is courageous, kind,
tartly funny, a good friend, and a determined woman. As she says when she
writes her own obituary (“although in perfectly good health”):
She knew the
kindness of dear friends and, eventually, the love of a good man.
Sullivan’s publisher at Minneapolis-based
Milkweed Editions, summed up the power of the book, saying that the characters
would be thought entirely ordinary in real life, “yet, in Faith’s hands as a
novelist, they’ve become extraordinary…”
