And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with book markers
That measure what we’ve lost
—Paul Simon, The Dangling Conversation
As happens with the characters in Adjustments, readers of this complex novel will also have their perceptions exposed and altered. It happens rather quickly. We learn that things are not always what they seem, or maybe they are what they seem as well.
Joe Murphy, a 75-year-old retired fireman, summons Will Phillips, an insurance adjuster, for a leaky roof. Upon entering Joe’s house, Will encounters the first puzzle about Joe—a scuffed pair of roller skates on a church kneeler. And we readers are now set on an odyssey of discovery about these two men, unlikely ever to be friends, and the characters, past and present, that come and go in the places of their lives.
When I write I choose my words carefully, So I notice the very first sentence does not read, What would an old man do with a pair of roller skates? It does not say, What does an old man want with a pair of roller skates? The first sentence that begins the novel reads:
What does an old man need with a pair of roller skates?
And so I continued reading with my first impressions of what Adjustments might be about: In a world where things may or may not be what they seem, how do we learn what we need? How do we learn the needs of others in our lives? What is a friend and where and how do we find them?
Within these questions are others, crisscrossed like the frayed laces of that pair of roller skates:
What is the difference between alone and lonely? Will seemed to like being by himself on the road instead of the office work necessary to his job. He did admire the character of Barton Keyes, his three-piece suit and big cigar. But then he went nostalgic for the country with its old barns and farmers in classic coveralls.
Pulling off the road once at the summit of the Dakota Coteau he was absorbed in the beauty and peace of the valley below.
When people talk about the landscapes that seem to go on forever, they’re talking about this place.
For twenty years, I lived in the deep country in North Carolina, well over an hour from Raleigh where I worked. Cities and their people have a lot to offer. I enjoyed the culture there, but as the day progressed toward evening my thoughts drifted most times to my porch swing, where I could hear the night move through the trees under a multitude of stars. So I can understand Will’s conflicting feelings. I felt he harbored a hidden loneliness beneath the façade of a loner.
Joe, on the other hand, was lonely. He missed Millie, his wife whom he told Will had been gone now eight years, three months and six days. Throughout their marriage, she read him a poem every morning at breakfast. It was poetry that brought them together.
Poetry can be a peculiar gateway, Will. It can be a way into all kinds of things that don’t seem to have a way in, or that we don’t even know we want in.
Poetry plays a major role in Adjustments, the choices the characters make for a poet. With Will and Joe it is Keats. What is the significance of Will’s identical copy of Keats having an upside-down cover? Pearl Jenkins likes Emily Dickinson. And Joe names his cats Emily and Eliot. Hmmm.
How do these characters come to need one another and why. Does accident shape our lives as much as what we plan with the things we do? For me, so far, Joe seems to be somewhat of an angel for Will. Not really a destiny (Is there even such a thing outside romance stories?), but the two seem to satisfy a need previously missing and different for each man.
What to do with the past and memories? What do we do with our fears, those that are good, those that are not?
What are your thoughts? Share with us in the comment box.
Read along with us:
November 20: Chapters 1 – 17
December 4: Chapters 17 – 34
December 11: Chapters 34 – 52
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Photo by Heath Cajandig, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Richard Maxson.
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Megan Willome says
So glad you pointed out the difference the word “need” makes (in regard to the roller skates). A lot of words in this book are like that–chosen deliberately, to carry a lot of meaning.
Rick Maxson says
There are not only specific words in Adjustments loaded with meaning or reference, but there are also instances that need to be carried along in the reader’s head, such as the doll’s head and barbie dress.
For me this is one of those novels that got better and better the further into I read.
Will Willingham says
It’s interesting, because in some cases I do very carefully choose the words I write, though in those cases it is also very painfully obvious.
In the case of the skates, I’m not sure there was, at the conscious level, an intention. But I think in the end, there may have been such a thing at a deeper level beyond my awareness.
🙂
Rick Maxson says
Our subconsciousness slips into what we write, I’ve believed for some time. Years ago I read a book on poetry by John Ciardi titled, “How a Poem Means.” He used several poems to illustrate his thesis, but one in particular spoke to me. Until then I had struggled thinking that poets always selected every minutia of every poem: structure, rhythm, metaphors etc. Ciardi believed they did not. The poem I remember the best was Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening.” Ciardi illustrates how the poem works, how it takes us from the specific to the general as many good poems do. However, the enigmatic repetition of “And miles to go before I sleep” is something even Frost has admitted having trouble answering completely. Ciardi writes, a symbol is like a rock thrown in a pool of water. It sends out ripples in all directions. Perhaps the forst ripple created has a meaning to the author, but the ripples change by velocity, light, air as they are observed. The original intention and the shifting of meaning is “the very sparkle and life of poetry.”
So the first sentence of “Adjustments” definitely has a surface intention, a simple observation and a question why would an old man need a pair of roller skates? I also asked myself why they are hanging on a church kneeler, but that is for another discussion, maybe. Before I go any further into the novel, I could sit and ask many questions about those skates:
Are they a child’s skates, a man’s skates or a woman’s skates?
Are there children in the house?
Are the skates from Joe’s younger years?
Do the skates belong to someone outside the household?
Are they a memento?
How old are the “scuffed” skates?
Each one of these questions has its own set of ripples. Meaning is a shared thing belonging to the writer and the reader. And with any novel or poem, I have to ask, always, why this first line as opposed to any others that might have been chosen? Could Will Willingham not have begun this novel with,
“The old man was on the phone, and Will noticed that he favored his left side when he
walked away, after letting Will in the front door.”
This also carries a bit of a ‘hook’ a mystery to invite the reader in. So, why skates?
When we write poems or stories, we write from the depths of us. The poem now always has water in it from the original ripples of the pebble of our awareness.
Will Willingham says
It’s true, the opening could have skipped the skates, though as Laura notes below, they kind of showed up as part of that “start anywhere” idea. (Though, also, as happens at times when I am editing a writer, the beginning is sometimes just what it took to get the piece started, that “throat-clearing” or “paper-shuffling,” and it could just as easily be lopped off. We opted not to in this case, but I did, for the life of this piece, struggle with the opening line. I finally rewrote it to my satisfaction just before we published, but still kept the roller skate. It may or may not be important to the story, but it was important to me for the overall work.)
Rick Maxson says
I didn’t mean to imply that you should have started with the paragraph I said. I was supporting what Laura said about starting anywhere. As I said, many novels start at the end and work backwards. One example of this sort of, is A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Irving said he wrote the opening paragraph last, and it implicitly and subtly alludes to the culmination of the story when Irving writes, “I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
Will Willingham says
No worries, I didn’t hear it that way. Was just pondering myself how it ended up being the roller skates, and why I didn’t opt to cut them loose. 🙂
L.L. Barkat says
🙂
I think it’s worth remembering that this book began as an attempt to prove that a novel could not be written by “starting anywhere” (or maybe, actually, written at all by the author). 🙂
The roller skates were a doodle that Will actually made, though the person who saw the doodle misinterpreted the doodle as roller skates. Apparently, the drawing was of something else entirely, that no one now remembers. So Will took this doodle that was misinterpreted as roller skates and used it to begin a story that ended up at 530+ pages.
This suggests it may in fact be possible to “start anywhere” when writing a novel (that is good news). It suggests that deeper themes inside the author can make their way through almost any image the author chooses to begin with, though I do like those scuffed roller skates and their ambiguous background and their puzzling appeal to Joe.
What is fascinating to me is that a real-life misidentified object became the basis for a story where misidentification is somewhat of a theme in the book—like you say, Rick, things are not always what they seem. Later, Joe will take this up with his comments about the two books—his Keats and Will’s Keats—though their covers are on differently (Will’s is on upside down, a mistake of the publisher), Joe notes they are essentially the same inside. For multiple reasons, this is a poignant theme in the story, not the least of which is the underlying quiet thread of how Will Phillips has gone through life as a man who is not “macho” (and thus his manhood has been doubted and even mocked), but he is eventually quite strong in unexpected ways. Barbara, who we come to understand to be a force of fantastic proportions (not unlike the forces many men will face in their lives, though in different guises) becomes one of the major points around which this theme turns.
This is why I say it’s a novel for our time. I do believe there are men who need to face enormous forces with courage, and that is the ultimate manhood test rather than many of the more superficial ways society sometimes expects men to be men.
Rick Maxson says
In May of 2018 we posted a poem in Every Day Poems by Holly Wren Spaulding, titled “To Be Great, Be a Whale.” This poem was written from the poet mishearing a Pessoa poem, “To Be Great, Be Whole.”
I agree, misunderstandings can be a great source of inspiration and creativity. I like reading English interpretations of foreign language poems because they tend to have to ‘bend’ English or the original language of the writing to make it ‘mean’ in a way that is truest. Tomas Transtromer poems are especially my favorite because he tends to bend his own language before it ever gets to English.
There are novels that begin with the outcome and work backwards. Adjustments could have started with the last few pages, which I will not reveal here, and worked backwards. So you can start anywhere to tell a story, but there are, nevertheless (in most cases), some conventions that need to be followed, like a hook. like tenses.
L.L. Barkat says
Conventions, yes (unless your book is breaking them for some good reason).
I was thinking that it was rather fun that Will had no other reason to originally start this story with roller skates than that he was prompted to, as a challenge. He accepted the challenge. We got these rather amazing results. 🙂
(That’s funny about the Whale poem!)
Rick Maxson says
Amazing results, YES!
Thanks for unbolding me. 🙂
Will Willingham says
One thing that I’m not sure whether the story fully explores or not (which I say because what people hear/see in this story continues to amaze me (in a good way), because I don’t always hear/see those same things above the surface) is the sense of loss Will experiences over that moment of strength in the face of the force that is Barbara. It happens quite later in the book, but is encapsulated in the short little response he gives to Cameron while telling a story in the closet:
“Oh.” Cameron said, working a smudge on her glass with
her thumb. “And did this pretty girl like the story?”
“She did not.”
So strength is one thing, but strength has a price.
Rick Maxson says
I may be reading more into Barbara than you intended, but the whole Barbara thing fascinated me the way “Barbara” kept showing up. She remained fascinating to the very end.
Comparing Joe’s Millie to Will’s Barbara and the effect on their lives was especially meaningful to me. Strength has many faces in the realm of loss and memory and Adjustments demonstrates that well.
Will Willingham says
Thanks Rick.
Barbara was (is) an enigma. I spent a very good part of the book not having the slightest idea what her deal was, and what to do with her. But as you say, she kept showing up. 🙂
L.L. Barkat says
As my older daughter (one of the editors on Adjustments) noted to me, Barbara was an absolute force that, in its way, contained everything Will was struggling against.
For that reason, she needed to remain an enigma, and she also had aspects that felt bigger than life. The fact that she is, at one point, associated at the image level with not just a spider but also its web speaks to the idea that she begins to approach the level of symbol.
Symbol for what? Maybe society itself. Maybe the judgements of certain parts of society. Maybe all that threatens us with its false interpretations of who we are and who we should be and what we should care about—the kind of threat that asks us to compromise very important things, both personally and communally (even, perhaps, nationally, which is mildly intimated in the hospital scene).
Not to give any spoilers, but it feels important that such threats, while difficult to stand up to, work to ultimately disfigure and deeply harm us. For Will, he encountered this intimately long ago, but it wasn’t until he met Joe that he could see how Barbara (or “the force”) was still working to disfigure and harm him, albeit in less clearcut ways than in the past.
I wonder at Joe. How he became such a beautifully perceptive man, open and generous and accepting and hopeful. His perceptions, generosity, acceptance, and hope were forces in themselves. Not ones that coerced and harmed but waited to be received. To Will’s credit, he did the receiving.
Rick Maxson says
It is difficult to get fully into Barbara without being a spoiler, but she is not only a symbol of what Will is struggling against, but she is also representative of what Will needs (and there is that word again). In what we have read up to Chapter 17, this is evident in the treatment of Barbara the GPS. Will has an aversion to the GPS. At times he likes to get lost, but there are times he seems to despise having to use the GPS (Barbara) to be somewhere on time, or find his way home.
Will likes the great wide open, while he admires the trappings of structure (Barton Keyes) and needs structure in spite of himself. I think we all have some of this duality in us. In the next discussion this dislike of structure will be legitimized in part. Stay with us.
Sandra Heska King says
In other words, “What does an old man with a pair of roller skates need?”
Thinking that Will’s ongoing “battle” with Barbara / Barbara bears watching.
“Forget it, Barbara. I don’t need you for this one.”
Also thinking that dust might be one of those well-chosen words / metaphors.
I smiled at the references to Runyan the poet / Bunyan the lumberjack. And totally cracked up at the things falling from the roof–especially Will in his underwear–then Keats and the cell phone.
Sandra Heska King says
Wow. I just popped back here and realized I missed a whole mess of discussion. Not sure how that happened. I’ll blame it on riding through the Keys connected through my hot spot.
Bethany R. says
Am enjoying the book, post, and discussion here. I’m struck by the myriad of vulnerable situations characters find themselves in, and the different ways they are treated or viewed by others in those moments.