I just spent a month in a rented maison in rural France, completing revisions to my forthcoming novel. And although I hadn’t quite planned to read “Care of Wooden Floors” by Will Wiles while there, I was struck by the similarities between his anonymous first-person character and my own situation.
Anonymous, a London copywriter, is asked by his perfectionist friend to house-sit in his perfect condo apartment in an unnamed European city for an unspecified length of time – perhaps a month. Oskar, classical music composer, orchestra conductor and the owner, has left notes all over the flat with instructions and admonitions, chief among them not to spill anything on the French oak floors.
My landlord left a few notes, but wasn’t anywhere near as anal-compulsive as Oskar. But the stairs in my charming 150-year-old maison were indeed French oak, like Oskar’s, and every time I trod them, for weeks, I recalled Wiles’ novel.
Anonymous spills wine of the French oak floor the very first night he’s there, and things go rapidly downhill day after day. I felt myself spiraling down with him through the levels of Dante’s hell, alternately amused, distraught, horrified, and always wondering how he could allow one dire event after another, each worse, to befall him.
But as I read and speculated, I detected one common occurrence: the bad stuff always happened during, or after, Anonymous had consumed large quantities of alcohol. I began to wonder if Wiles had written a morality tale: Here is a man who has agreed to the condo-sitting with the best intentions – to devote his time to concentrated and focused writing [as I was doing on my own self-styled sabbatical] – but who can’t seem to get out of his cups. Was he a heavy drinker before he arrived? It doesn’t seem so. Could he not see where that bottle of wine was leading him? Again, it doesn’t seem so. He’s a lost soul, and remains so.
This first novel was, for me, an impressive tour de force. Wiles is able to sustain the extreme dramatic tension through Anonymous’s interior monologue with its obsessive-compulsive edge. Never once do we think this is going to end well; we keep turning pages to learn just how badly. But complementing Anonymous’ maudlin, existential narrative is one of the keenest senses of satire I’ve read. As keen as the master Jonathan Swift, but utterly contemporary. In some ways I was reminded of the narcissistic, dysfunctional husband-and-wife narrators in Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl.”
Favorites quotes from “Care of Wooden Floors:”
“The path was deserted in both directions and the few windows that watched over this site were empty, industrial, large grids of glass with random panes smashed out like moves in a game of dereliction.”
Or this: when Oskar demands Anonymous attend a classical music concert, music which Anonymous normally finds intolerable, he says, “All classical music is recognizable in an oh-isn’t-this-the-tune-from-the-Kenco-advert way….”
Anonymous seems to drift into a best-of-all-worlds, life-is-but-a-dream soliloquy as he leaves to catch his plane back to London. He has left without writing a word during his stay, seemingly incapable of looking back with any emotion or reflection at all. Fortunately for me, our similar journeys diverged: I finished my revision. In fact, my entire month-long stay ended on a much more positive note than his, for which I’m sure my landlord will be grateful.
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