Stay Inside for Those You Love

Bel Canto. Ann Patchett. Harper, 2001. 336 pp. $25.99 (cloth).

In these unsettling/upsetting/unprecedented times, as so many corporate
emails begin these days, I find myself annoyed with articles
promising me THE BEST BOOKS TO READ IN QUARANTINE. What
irritates me about these lists is the implication that a particular kind of
book is most satisfying now, whether it’s about pandemics (telling us to
look directly at what’s happening outside) or offering escape (giving us
the opportunity to look away). Instead, fidgety as I am even when not
stuck inside, I’m drawn to reading books that fall outside these categories,
such as Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. (Or maybe I was subconsciously
influenced by some hand-soap company telling me to “stay inside for
those you love,” which could also be a tagline for the book.)

Like so many recent anxiety dreams, Bel Canto begins with a large
crowd, at the home of the vice president of an unnamed South American
country, and its inciting incident is a birthday party for Mr. Hosokawa,
head of a Japanese electronics company, whom the vice president
hopes might build a factory nearby. Mr. Hosokawa, a lifelong opera
devotee, has been enticed here in part by the chance to hear the famous
American soprano, Roxanne Coss. As if punishing him for feigning
interest in local investment in order to see Ms. Coss sing, armed insurgents
(three generals and several teenagers) crash the party, planning
to hold the president ransom for a host of revolutionary demands.
However, in what is only the first deviation from what we might expect,
the president is not actually there (he’s at home watching his favorite
soap opera), and the insurgents now have a house full of hostages, but
no real leverage or Plan B. What ensues is a four-month standoff full
of new relationships, beautiful music, and surprising personal growth.
Throw in the ending—the police reprise the original incursion, to
disastrous effect—and the sum total is the best (and worst) of what
anyone could hope for from a party.

The first association one might have with the novel is music, and
for good reason. Yet when I think of Bel Canto, I don’t think of the
opera that fills the novel so much as of the house that contains it: not
the music so much as the acoustics. In particular, I think of the way
that Patchett uses two often opposed modes of having constrained
space drive plot: creating pressure and alleviating it. The effects of a
confined setting on a story may remind us of the recent disputes about
stay-at-home orders: Does limited space constrain us within or protect
us from what’s without? Do walls create pressure to escape them, or
do they alleviate pressure from forces outside? Both can be productive
engines of story. Bringing characters together and keeping them there
until they air their grievances is a reliable formula for drama, from “It
was a dark and stormy night” pulp to the novels of Virginia Woolf (or
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for that matter). The story mechanics
are those of making popcorn: enclose people, apply heat/pressure,
and watch them transform. Conversely, there is no shortage of novels
that begin with characters seeking refuge. Whether they are entering
a town or a house, freedom from what was chasing them affords them
the opportunity to develop, while the fear of the past catching up with
them maintains the drama.

These formulas are reliable and satisfying, but they do not always
surprise, whereas Bel Canto stands out because of the relationships it
portrays and the remarkable shifts in characters. Mr. Hosokawa and
Roxanne Coss fall in love, despite having no common language. So
too do Gen (Hosokawa’s translator) and Carmen, one of the young
insurgents. Other interactions—one of the generals and a soldier play
chess, a captive man imagines another soldier to be a kind of surrogate
son—are platonic yet equally rewarding. As are some of the individual
arcs, like the French diplomat who rediscovers his love of cooking,
or the story of young Beatriz, an insurgent who becomes obsessed with
the same soap opera that kept the president from attending. Patchett
uses the concept of confined space first to thrust together people with
nothing in common and then to protect them and allow them to grow
into their new selves.

Consider one of the two central relationships: Hosokawa and Coss.
Not only would they never have met if not for these circumstances, but
they would never have had the capacity for intimacy; he, a highly mannered
executive, and she, a world-famous soprano, would not have let
their guards down (or, in Hosokawa’s case, set his marriage aside) if not
in such a high-pressure environment. In this way, confinement works
in Bel Canto as it often does: the pressures of space and time bring out
underlying desires; more broadly, acute/external conflict activates and
engages chronic/internal conflict. Or, as screenwriter Robert McKee
says about the relationship between plot and character: “True character
is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the
greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to
the character’s essential nature.”

But as we see in Bel Canto, while that kind of pressure is necessary,
it is often not sufficient, particularly for a narrative built on satisfying
surprise. Neither Hosokawa nor Coss is characterized as chronically
lonely. Hosokawa seems to desire more solitude, as it is in these moments
he can embrace his real love, opera, a tendency revealed early
in the book: “The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a
live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability
to love.” As for Coss, if she hadn’t been invited to his party,

Her life would have gone on like a train on schedule: Argentina, New 
York, a visit to Chicago, then back to Italy. Now she was completely 
stopped. She thought of Katsumi Hosokawa sitting by the window, 
listening while she sang, and she wondered how it was possible to love 
someone you couldn’t even speak to. She believed now there was a 
reason why all of this had happened: his birthday and her invitation to be, 
in a sense, his birthday present, why they had been stuck here all this 
time. How else would they have met? How else would there have been 
any way to get to know someone you couldn’t speak to, someone who 
lived on the other side of the world, unless you were given an 
enormous amount of empty time to simply sit and wait together?

Patchett nurtures their unexpected relationship by giving them time
and space to stumble into it. The novel demonstrates that even where
opposites might attract, they need to first cross high barriers; they must
be near enough, for long enough, under pressure enough . . . and they
then need time and space to develop. The biggest plot shift of Bel Canto
is the development of a new normal, a détente between insurgents and
police that allows those who have been separated from their old lives
the time and space to build new ones within the walls, (temporarily)
safe from everything outside.

Toward this purpose, Patchett uses not just walls, but the house’s
interior spaces. Consider the other love story, between Gen and Carmen.
There would have been no normal occasion for these two to meet, let
alone talk—even the most ambitious rom-com writer wouldn’t imagine
putting together a Japanese executive translator and a South American
child soldier. And even within the walls there is no real reason for Gen
and Carmen to communicate (there’s even risk involved for Carmen
to do so, slipping out of her military responsibilities). She initially is
drawn to Gen in the hope that he might teach her written Spanish
(the insurgents primarily speak Quechua), but the lessons that ensue
become as much a pretense to spend time together as an educational
enterprise. In order to fulfill these joint goals, they need a safe space
within the house: first a brief encounter in the bathroom, and then a
regular middle-of-the-night appointment in the china closet. In the
small space of the bathroom, they are so close to each other that “they
owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy
with their desire and worked to move them together.” In their stolen
language lessons in the upstairs cabinet, Gen and Carmen find more
than the loyalty that defined them before entering the house (Gen to
Hosokawa, Carmen to the generals). There are also countless other
examples of pockets of space that allow characters to escape pressure
(the kitchen for the French diplomat, the yard for the German jogger,
the TV room for soap-obsessed Beatriz), even as the characters are
in a position to discover them only because of the initial pressure of
confinement.

In this way, Patchett achieves the benefits of a confined novel as
well as those of an open one, showing that space for exploration is not
limited to the road or the sea; sometimes you need only a large house.
Moreover, the book’s arc (in particular the surprising yet satisfying
shifts in personality and relationships) is built on the movement
between these two modes of using walls, as the prison of the first several
chapters is replaced by the protected Eden of their new routines. And
so, while (thankfully) this novel does not present any clear metaphor
for managing the reality of captivity, it does suggest that confinement
is, perhaps, the ideal metaphor for thinking about the mechanics of the
novel itself. All novels are confined; even the most expansive,
roaming novel must make decisions about the time and space it allows its
characters. Those strictures provide both pressure and opportunity. An
even greater feat is a book, like Bel Canto, that demonstrates those two
extremes simultaneously.

Read more from Issue 17.2.