As an interior decor enthusiast, I regularly scroll through the swarm of pictures of whatever styles. And I have spent enough time there to learn that I don’t like: 1) a space dressed in white and beige 2) straight, modern lines and 3) a big living room occupied by humongous sectionals and a coffee table with the Tom Ford artbook. Unfortunately, these make up a big chunk of the “boho chic” and woody “Scandi” variations, two of the most popular styles for the past five years. The same styles make up about 70% of what comes up in “DIY decor tips” and 90% of “interior decor” in a Korean search engine.
A neutral color palette is key, which is supposed to be chic and mentally relaxing. But for a neurotic obsessed with bright colors (me), a space mumbling in calming beige makes you jittery.
What I find more annoying is that those boho chic houses just don’t feel like home. I can’t imagine rubbing my heel calluses against those pristine sectionals or having coffee in my dirty red pajamas in a white-washed dining room. Those impeccably adorned interiors that dominate Instagram and Pinterest remind me only of a model house.
A model house has a carefully anonymous look that leaves just enough illusive room for personalization. It is something between a hotel room and someone else’s house, so it could appeal and sell to as many people as possible. What a model house intentionally omits are the traces of personal history—a hand grease on wallpaper, old family photos, a late night snack’s yellow mustard stain on a couch cover. It is this jumble of traces and memories that those beautiful Scandi houses seem to lack, something that makes a house, home.
For the past five years, I have grown particularly attached to my memories of travels, both temporary sojourns and relocations. Frequent moves were parts of my childhood, happening once every two or so years till I was 14. Then five years ago, came the giant relocation to the opposite side of the Pacific. After a 19-hour flight, I entered an empty room that became my first apartment in the US. Two suitcases, zero furniture. I browsed the Amazon home goods page sitting on the bare floor, sweating mad because it was 31℃ outside (didn’t learn Fahrenheit yet) and I had no window AC unit. As my butt started to ache from sitting too long on the hard floor, I registered the distance I traveled. And the four naked walls of my room. I felt an urgent need to mess up those blank walls.
“I was thinking about the places that people choose to live,” says Michelle de Kretser, the Sri Lankan born Australian writer, about her novel The Life to Come (2017). The novel, a loosely serial work after Questions of Travel (2012) which won the 2013 Miles Franklin Award, is de Kretser’s life-long meditation on who and what makes home, moves, and travels. At the age of fourteen, she emigrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka to Australia. She also spent time in Paris to teach, pursue a graduate degree, and work as an editor of a travel magazine Lonely Planet, an experience that made her conversant with the language of leisure traveling. “Tourism was seen by privileged people as a transcendent phenomenon,” says de Kretser. She continues that people who have time and means to travel to exotic corners of the world prefer “travel” to “tourism” because it “sounds grander: more cultural and less coarsely material.” It is more or less “a spiritual practice.”
Questions of Travel and The Life to Come are de Kretser’s two-part attempt at unglorifying leisure travel and replacing it with an idea of travel that is plainer and inseparable from everyday life. So, de Kretser looks at a space that seems the most everyday-like and farthest away from travel—home.
While home and travel are not new literary subjects, they rarely get close to the apparently cosmetic and unliterary realm of home décor as The Life to Come does. I am used to literary homes that are ideas—a stand-in for memory and history, an anchor for loving or detestable nostalgia for migrants. I felt and still feel that this is an aesthetically beautiful and timeless, literary connection. So whenever I opened my Pinterest app, I had to switch mode to the cool / unliterary interior décor trends. The Pinterest décor world was too practical and stark to embrace something as emotional and sensitive as memory. The switching felt uncomfortable and hypocritical since I inhabited the two worlds with almost equal gravity.
Few literary works gets as close to the apparently cosmetic and “unliterary” realm of home décor as The Life to Come.
This is why I felt both caught and liberated at de Kretser’s dexterous amalgamation of travel, memory, home, and interior décor. De Kretser links with such precision and inventiveness a magazine-worthy boho-chic house in a suburb and the owner’s anxiety and self-consciousness around her provincial childhood. In another, the home’s generic and anonymous interior signals the person’s distinctively expansive view toward travel and history. With exceptional eyes for visual details, de Kretser looks at the homes of the five characters, Ash, Cassie, Céleste, Pippa, and Christabel, to whom she carefully distributed the different forms of travel and attitudes on the pass of time. The result is a constellation of interiors that speak to and nod at the mental traces of physical travels and the motley sentiments along the way.
De Kretser knows well the sort of travel assumed for a non-white immigrant moving to a “white” country, such as herself (“refugee”). And shrewdly, she makes Ash, a migrant Sri Lankan college professor, travel the vastest distance and in under the most distressing circumstance among her characters. Ash left Colombo during its political turmoil, which labels him to the white Australians around him a refugee with a haunting past.
This sympathy is uncalled for. Ash doesn’t feel that he has “suffered” that much. His affluent background allowed him to leave the country unscathed unlike many others. People (want to) read wistfulness in his “eyes.” But instead of a romantic trauma, those eyes project scholarly accuracy that is neither icy nor boiling. Ash surveys the world and his own travels with composure, order, and a long spectrum of time, History with capital H. Ash regards his moves to Australia and then to the eastern US as two solid but very small dots in a long time and vast expanse of space. While Ash is aware of the physical and psychological repercussions of his migrations, they don’t have melancholy strings that pull him back to the past.
I would call Ash a Traveler with capital T, who moves in a time frame of History beyond that of individual life. Other travelers leave home, often a single physical place, and return to it. To them, home is either a nostalgic (or detestable) link to the past or a stronghold to course through life in new places. A Traveler, on the other hand, doesn’t have a home nor particularly needs to, because movement / travel is their default condition of life and History. Every place is a temporary post to a conscious Traveler. A Traveler would walk through different posts with pleasure or discomfort. But no post bears a sense of displacement or fierce attachment. All posts are anonymous.
A Traveler doesn’t have, or need, a home. Every place is a temporary post. And all posts are anonymous.
This is exactly how Ash treats and passes through his homes or temporary abodes. Ash’s homes are like those in period dramas, attractive and impersonal. Ash doesn’t change a thing in his room in a Victorian-style mansion in Sydney, offered to him by an emeritus professor. The house is like a museum replica of Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee. It has a “big, high-ceiling” and the “long stair” that leads up to “a room at the top of a tower” where the professor’s “hard chair, and a table that served as a desk” still sit under the dusty “glint.”
Ash doesn’t add any object that would indicate that he stayed here. He looks at and touches the displayed objects with a brief and calm appreciation of a visitor. He shows the same, moderate appreciation to a generic, suburban American house with an “unnamed modern painting” that he later moves into. There is no desire to claim these places as his. Home as the one, loving place in time is a concept that he has merely a mild affection for. Home doesn’t ail Ash. It’s lovely enough to call forth a brief feeling that is “close to homesickness without sadness.”
Unlike Ash, Céleste is fervently attached to everything about her present home. A French-Australian in her fifties working in Paris as a fiction translator and a part-time English instructor, Céleste takes in all the protuberances of this place in this moment. If Ash is a Traveler, Céleste is an Inhabiter. She wants to collapse time to the present moment. In her small apartment in rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette (of course, where else?), “The Museum of Romantic Life,” time disappears, and along with it, the memories of travels and the hazy prospect of the future. There is only a reality-defying affair with a lovely, married French woman twenty years younger than Céleste. There is only the “buoyant” feeling of being alive. The apartment looks like a romantic, cinematic den—as if the youthfully disarrayed quarter in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers has met the more mature atmosphere of Cléo de 5 à 7:
Céleste has tidied her room, with its long windows, removing papers and dictionaries from the table and stacking them behind a chair. Sabine’s latest flowers, green hellebores and lavender tulips, stood beside the sofa that converted to a bed. Céleste set up folding chairs and laid a stiff damask cloth on the table. The china had been picked up in markets and junk shops—nothing matched, but everything pleased her. […] She had felt buoyant and lucky, grateful to life.
Céleste takes in the texture of each object and its story, deliberately—the hours with Sabine from the scent of the green hellebores, the small elation at the serendipitous finds in a flea market. The uncomfortable memories of Sydney and the encroaching future are gently blocked. There isn’t a thing in the room that reminds of Céleste’s unease with her parents. “The sun” in her apartment, shining softly on the delicate “jasmine,” is nothing like Sydney’s “catastrophic light” from which she “fled” at twenty-two. Though the translator work won’t promise a financially secure life, the beauty of the effortlessly stacked “papers and dictionaries” is enough to make Céleste “grateful” that she is inhaling their richness.
In a home devoted to all the protuberances of this place in this moment, time collapses to the present.
But a museum is not free from the peering eyes of visitors or the dust collecting on its display glass. Both infiltrate Céleste’s time capsule, for one, as a visit from her sleek, all-Australian relatives. The time-defying beauty of her den wrinkles against her half-brother’s massive, ultra-modern family house in Perth. Their house has “a parents’ retreat, spas in two of the four bathrooms, a swimming pool, and a guest suite.” Her mining engineer brother has been profiting greatly from the mineral boom in Western Australia. And accordingly, their house blares a garish future—unashamedly new, brutally straight, and nondescriptly expensive. Like the lethal Australian light, the mansion’s fluorescent sheen exposes “the color of old teeth” of the once-white ceiling in Céleste’s apartment. She follows the gaze of her bored, too-tall nephews to her damask cloth that doesn’t “reach to the ends of the table.” She has a pitiful realization—the clock of her life has been ticking and the commercial logic / truth of the world is ever strong. She has just been oblivious to them, not beyond them. When time penetrates, only the “sense of wasted effort” fills the once-romantic museum.
If there is only eternal present in Céleste’s home, there is only future in Pippa’s, a striving Australian writer with mediocre talent. It’s as if the time has rushed ahead of the present Pippa, beckoning her to look the part of the shiny future self, a successful, hip novelist. Accordingly, she prunes certain things about her past or present that don’t match this future vision. Such as her provincial name “Narelle” that doesn’t fit a future Man Booker winner. The future with its seductive brilliance orchestrates Pippa’s memories and present appearances, including her home.
Along with her old name “Narelle,” Pippa tries to plaster over her memories of “bogan” upbringing by decorating the Sydney rental that she shares with her musician partner Matt in a cool, artsy vibe. On the surface, the apartment is a classic, chaotic den of a young artist couple, like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s “aggressively seedy,” 70s New York flat. A brooding ground of stubborn passion, ambition, and soon-to-be-rewarded talents. They use “torches and candles” because “the wiring is suspect.” They make love “as lively and purposeful as lions” as her toothbrush grows “mushy” with perpetual dampness due to poor ventilation.
Unfortunately, talent, the core ingredient of the glorious future, is what the couple’s home lacks. Matt doesn’t make it to any of the prestigious orchestras in London or Boston and Pippa struggles with her poor writing. Without the sublimating ingredient, the couple’s presence in the apartment looks “vaguely dodgy” than glamorous. A sad indication that they are just not that “good,” and thus, just don’t look the part.
Pippa notices this lack with urgency and self-consciousness. They fuel her vigilance to curate her present look perfectly, watching out for an unfitting, invasive memory. After the moderate sales of her first book, she moves to a place more fitting to a mid-career novelist, a boho-chic style house in a retro-hip Sydney suburb where the “back door opened onto treetops and sky” and the tress in the luscious garden “set light and shade moving on pavements.” This is a home that hums in a low yet confident voice unassuming affluence, “eco-conscious” life, and a proper appreciation for the pre-gentrification graffiti. Certainly, this is not the kind of home that would have a tacky, neon-color “loop shag chenille” bathmat.
A house obsessed with the future vigilantly curates its present appearance to look the part.
(image sources (left, right): Amazon, photo by Cole Keister on Unsplash)
Pippa stumbles upon a picture of the bathmat in a random photo on her social media feed. The sight brings back the sheer childhood pleasure of feeling that plushness for the first time, which at the same time, alarms her. Pippa, or Narelle, learned through an embarrassing experience that such a mat is dowdy. “Genuine bogan,” her first college housemate dismissively said at Narelle’s excited “look!” Still, Pippa can’t quite control imagining that mat in the picture-perfect boho chic home, stepping on its shaggy surface, laughing loudly. It’s a liberating moment from her own nervous curation. There is a perverse and unruly joy. The mat would tamper her beautiful home office, the memory of a “bogan” childhood would return hard, all neon, as if the past is rebelling. And it takes a great deal of Pippa’s mental and visual police to stop that past from messing everything up.
In the home of Pippa’s neighbor Christabel, a Sri Lankan woman in her sixties, there is “an echo of the old, warm world” in the air. Unlike Pippa’s, the past and its memories add “warming” touches to Christabel’s present home which looks totally plain. From the ordinary yet reassuring childhood days in Sri Lanka, the echo reverberates and reaches Christabel in the Sydney apartment that she shared with her decades-old companion Bunty till Bunty succumbed to dementia.
But this doesn’t mean that the past colonizes Christabel’s present home, as the future does in Pippa’s, with swarms of memorabilia. In fact, Christabel’s home looks sparse with very little decoration and almost no object of nostalgia:
Bunty called her front room the soft room because the chairs in the other rooms were hard. The soft room was where she watched TV, listened to her radio, and kept her bottle of scotch.
The neutral passage, running from the kitchen to the soft room, linked her domain with Bunty’s. They were connected but apart. […] The windows faced the wrong way or were shaded with verandas; daylight entered differently, slithering into the small rooms. Christabel didn’t notice […]
What channels the hums of the past is not physical objects, but the traces of “connect[ion]” with Bunty. An undefined front room becomes the distinctive “soft room” because Bunty names it so. The rest therefore becomes the “hard” rooms, a liminal space connecting the two friends when they are physically “apart.” The “wrong” angle of the windows, which would immensely annoy Pippa, Christabel hardly registers. The look of the window is not important. What is important is the daylight from that window that used to allow Christabel to see Bunty watching TV.
A home can look totally plain and still hum the melody of the old memories. It is not objects but the connection with your companion that channels it.
This also explains why Christabel and Bunty don’t display any trinkets from their travels abroad in their home. Unlike in Céleste’s apartment, things don’t carry memories or vitality in themselves. And even less do those things appear chic. They just look “foul” and out of place in Christabel and Bunty’s home. Revisiting their chatter over the inn’s bad toilet or rock-hard mattress is enough for the two friends to hear the melodies of those travels.
Thinking of Christabel and Bunty throwing away the “foul” Buddha statuette, their latest souvenir from Thailand, in a “charity bin,” I imagined the same statuette sitting on the mantel with studied ease in Pippa’s apartment as an evidence of a “spiritual” trip. The two apartments are structurally identical and physically close. Too close, unfortunately. The visually pleasing yet obsessive atmosphere of Pippa’s apartment has its way of invading Christabel’s. In Pippa’s supposedly casual social visit, Christabel feels exposed to her young neighbor’s scrutinizing presence:
On Pippa’s side of the wall, their conversation had unrolled in the intimate glimmer of strategically placed lamps. Here, the overhead light was sinister and flat. The unheated room smelled of used pillows. Reproach was a faint blue aura rising from the mismatched beds, the dressing gowns hanging behind the door, the neglected chair.
For the first time, Christabel becomes aware of the “old, stewy” state of her apartment where the past’s beautifying echo is thinning along with Bunty’s memories. The “candles and lamps” that used to exude “soft brightness” with Bunty, now pops as stark and ugly. That beds should “match” has never even occurred to Christabel, for what do bedcovers have to with a conversation over the beds? However, without Bunty’s presence to adorn them, the unmatching beds look shabby and inadequate. “Life is long,” Christabel realizes with throbs. It feels like the future’s taut gaze penetrates the cloak of the past. The gaze exposes the sapped flesh of the present underneath, smelling musty like “used pillows.”
“Mildly disorienting,” says a reporter upon visiting Michelle de Kretser’s home in Dulwich Hill for an interview. “The lush vegetation, cane furniture and rattan blinds” which “suggest a verandah that could as easily belong in her native Sri Lanka as in Sydney’s inner west.” There is also (of course) the smell of “curry leaves” and “an impressive selection of French cheeses.” The article photo of de Kretser’s living room suggests the continuation of this refined, ethnic flair with a vintage-looking bookcase with glass doors, paintings in a subdued, taupe palette, and a rich book collection. The finishing touch is the Sri Lankan-Australian author herself sitting in the middle of the room, adding an authentic weight to the elegant cosmopolitan ambiance.
At least, that’s what the article seems to be wanting to see. I don’t know if the other parts of de Kretser’s house look as ethnically eclectic as the article suggests of her living room. And I’m not sure if the article wants to know. The rattan furniture and curry leaves seem classic enough proofs of what is expected in a home of someone who looks like, and has traveled like, de Kretser. What if the author’s home looked like Ash’s impersonal / white suburban Rhode Island house? Would the article even have mentioned the interior of her place?
It feels all the more ironic because this is a kind of expectation that de Kretser dodges in The Life to Come—that home is a display chamber of one’s identity or taste that is often subject to what is fashionable or hip at the time. Boho chic for a culturally conscious and sophisticated novelist as Pippa, and perhaps the article, seem to think. And The Life to Come makes it a point to disrupt this nervous yet lazy expectation.
I imagined de Krester buying that Sri Lankanish rattan chair in a random antique shop in Dulwich Hill. Maybe her bedroom is super minimal with no rattan at all. Maybe everything is in elegant white as a homage to her affluent, Christian childhood home in Sri Lanka.
And who knows what constellation of memories, present anxieties, and hopes for the future lie behind that sophisticated white decor?
Work Cited
de Kretser, Michelle. The Life to Come. Allen & Unwin, 2017.
Rolfe, Pamela. “Michelle de Kretser: My New Novel Imagines How Life Could Be Different.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 Sep 2017, www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/michelle-de-kretser-my-new-novel-imagines-how-life-could-be-different-20170921-gylp2l.html.
Trapè, Roberta. “Broken Novels, Ruptured Worlds: A Conversation with Michelle de Kretser.” World Literature Today 94.2, Summer 2020, p. 3-58.
“Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner.” Harper and Collins, https://www.harpercollins.com/products/just-kids-patti-smith?variant=40827485945890.
Cover images credit: (left, right) photo by Kate Darmody on Unsplash, photo by Dave Linabury on Flickr