A critic once remarked that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie writes so simply that a cat or a dog can understand her. It was meant as a compliment and taken as such. In her new book she turns her lucid gaze on a subject baffling to many of us: architecture.
In this candid interview she talks about what buildings tell us about their owners' aspirations and politics, why she built houses for fairies as a child, how she feels about being compared to Balzac and Jane Austen, and what her own home in upstate New York reveals about her.
The subtitle of your new book is "How Buildings Speak to Us." Can you unpack that idea a little?
Well, I believe any building, any house, any room even, is talking to us in its own language. We often hear or register the message subconsciously, but it's there. Sometimes the message is deliberate—the designer wants us to feel the way we're feeling. Sometimes it's completely unconscious. I don't think that most people set up their sitting room in order to say things like I'm a world traveler, or I love to read, or I don't like to sit too near to other people. But the message is there, and we pick it up.
Can you give me some examples?
If you think of the standard Victorian parlor, often there are as many as three sets of curtains at every window. There would be a sort of net curtain, then there would be a chintz curtain, and then there would be heavy velvet drapes, which were closed at night.
And if you look at paintings or photographs of these rooms, the exterior is shut out. Now if you look at ads in the paper today for new apartments in a big city, what you see are vast expanses of glass. Everything is open. Everything is visible.
So are we more narcissistic and voyeuristic as a culture than our Victorian forebears?
I don't think so.
But we want to be seen...