The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Interior Design: Stories by Philip GrahamJeanne Claire van Ryzin
Philip Graham. Interior Design: Stories. Scribner, 160 pp. $20.00.
In “Lucky,” one of eight stories in Philip Graham’s new collection, Interior Designs, Pete, a long-time owner of a men’s clothing store, begins a private daily ritual of whispering “good-bye” and “good luck” in order to alleviate his anxiety as many of his aging customers pass away. “But I kept up this little game for weeks,” he remarks, “and I began to seem strange to myself.” Indeed it is the creation of such personal customs—the designs and arrangements that constitute the soul’s need to make order of the world and its events—that is the common theme of Graham’s elegant, disquieting, and powerful tales. Graham’s characters are people who believe not only in their ability to “see the invisible” and but also that “the everything unseen can ultimately be recovered.”
In the collection’s title story a woman, Josephine, embarks on a career as an interior designer after a childhood constrained and guilt-ridden by her homebuilder father’s deceptive custom of outfitting his model homes with three-quarter size furniture in order to make the rooms appear larger. As an adult, Josephine distinguishes her design practice by specializing in using her client’s dreams as the basis of decorating their homes. For them she creates interiors “as familiar as the self,” with “walls as comfortable as skin.” Yet her urgent vision implodes when she realizes that her designs cannot demarcate everything in her world. “How can I possibly escape my home when it’s inside me?” she laments.
Graham’s prose is marked by truly masterly touches: exacting observations are rendered both forcefully in their import as well as refined and respectful in their tone. Intense, absorbing, graceful, and precise, these tales of our fin-de-siècle America announce that the most intense and powerful events are the ones we create ourselves. In an elegant and original manner Graham delimits the private blueprints of the unconscious—the delicate, unstable, and never certain boundary between the real and the imagined—to reveal that “the true beauty . . . was that past, present, and future bled into each other.” [Jeanne Claire van Ryzin]