Here Are My Keys. Don’t Spill Anything on the Floor.
Will Wiles
“Care of Wooden Floors,” a novel by Will Wiles,
published in the United States this week by Amazon Publishing/New Harvest
($24), turns the placid act of house-sitting into one man’s existential
nightmare.
The narrator, a slacker copywriter, travels to a
nameless Eastern European city to watch the apartment of an old college friend,
Oskar, a composer who lives in “expensive, extravagant simplicity.” Among
Oskar’s many, many rules for his houseguest — feed the cats, replace any coffee
you drink, don’t play the piano — is one imploring him to take extra care to
preserve the French oak floors, a task at which he fails spectacularly.
Mr. Wiles, the former deputy editor of Icon, a
British design magazine, seems to both pay tribute to and satirize our desire
for a perfect domestic life. With his Le Corbusier chairs and rigid sense of
order, Oskar is an aesthete in the extreme, Mr. Wiles said. But the narrator is
“eager to spend time in Oskar’s flat so some of that perfection rubs off on
him.”
Mr. Wiles spoke by phone from his home in East
London about the inspiration for the novel and what irks him about the design
world.
Have you
house-sat before?
I got the idea for the book while I was looking
after an apartment owned by some friends of my sister. It was in Amsterdam. It
had wooden floors; also two cats. This business of having an insight into
someone’s life through their flat struck me as potentially fertile.
Can you really
know someone from seeing their home?
How people choose to live is really a quite
intimate insight into their personality. They’re setting up part of the world
precisely as they would want it. As such, they’re imprinting their character on
it: desires, aspirations, even fears. It tells you things you wouldn’t get from
conversation.
Do you know
anyone with Oskar’s fascistic sense of household order?
There’s no Oskar in my life. But, certainly,
Oskar-like traits are very widespread. In all of us there’s a sense that, if we
could just get our house in order, everything will fall into place. If we had
the proper kitchen, we’d be cooking all the time and putting on these giant
dinner parties. Or in the bedroom we’d be more, I don’t know, adventurous, if
only the dirty socks weren’t on the floor.
And yet the
narrator seems driven insane by living under such constraints.
You do find being taken out of your home and
staying somewhere else does slightly detach you. But when he begins to obsess,
he does crack up. The sense of being watched by Oskar is a contributing factor
of the narrator’s paranoia and alarm. Oskar’s exertion of control is absolutely
and completely totalitarian.
What’s your own
home like?
Right now, I’m looking at a scene of considerable
disorder: heaps of magazines and boxes of things. We’re expecting a baby. The
Oskar tendency is very much in retreat over here.
The floor-care
manual that gives the novel its title reads like an absurd mash-up of Bob Vila
and a Buddhist monk.
I worked in architecture and design and saw a lot
of this New Age-y stuff. You get this spiritual guff — the idea that if you
just get slightly more expensive furniture you’ll be more fulfilled as a
person. I wanted to have my revenge on it. It makes me grind my teeth.
Is the novel a
comment on how one should live?
I wouldn’t want to suggest it was a manifesto for
anything. But it might serve as a warning of the dangers of striving for
perfection, and the impossibility of perfection. Good enough is good enough.
Human beings can’t be perfected.
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