Rachel Bowlby, Everyday Stories

Abstract

IN this book, Rachel Bowlby examines representations of ‘many ordinary days and their smaller and larger shaping cultural stories’ (2). She studies works in which ‘the mission of art—and it is a mission—is to represent what is ordinary and down-to-earth’ (10). This leads her to collate a wide variety of both literary and non-literary examples, prompting some intriguing and unusual links. For example, in the chapter entitled ‘A Single Man and a Single Day’, she places Homer’s Odyssey, Isherwood’s A Single Man, and Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child side by side, tying all three together via comparisons to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The texts for examination in ‘Numbered Days and Diaries’ are even more diverse; here, Bowlby looks at the diaries of Leonard Woolf and of Boswell, as well as Bridget Jones’s Diary, and considers them alongside an analysis of ‘“Wearable technology” such as the fitbit’ (49). As she does so, she makes numerous fascinating observations. For instance, in ‘Numbered Days and Diaries’, she notes that ‘[l]ike the digital confirmation of a PIN, the numbers of a four-digit date seem to provide an assurance of objectivity and precision’ (56). Throughout the chapter, she explores this idea, writing carefully about our impulse to exert control and order over a chaotic world. The chapter on ‘Commuting’ is especially interesting. Here, Bowlby collates examples from Great Expectations, Arnold Bennett, George Gissing, Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot in order to consider the representation of the commuter as a ‘plain man’ who, ‘almost by definition … lacks individuality’ (29 and 26). Having painted a series of careful vignettes of this character in his or her various literary forms, Bowlby concludes the chapter with a charming description of her own experience commuting, from which she realizes that ‘in reality no two journeys, even commutes, and no two days in the city, are ever the same’ (39–40).