A Perfect Arrangement
by Suzanne Berne
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0452283221
Publisher: Plume
Suzanne Berne’s first novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, won Great Britain’s Orange Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times and Edgar Allan Poe first fiction awards. She has published fiction and essays in numerous magazines and been a frequent contributor to The New York Times. She lives with her husband and two daughters outside of Boston.
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Q: The ending of A Perfect Arrangement is somewhat ambiguous. How do you view this future of this family? Do you think they can be happy or have they done too much damage to each other?
SB: To be honest, I haven't really thought much about these characters' lives beyond what happens to them in the novel. I do believe, however, that people who are able to look frankly at their lives and at the compromises and mistakes they've made, and who aren't crushed by doing so, have a good chance of making better choices for themselves in the future. In that way, both Mirella and Howard are different beings than who they were at the novel's beginning. They are less attached to appearances and to received ideas of what families should look like, and more aware of the preciousness of time and the provisional nature of life. The last chapter has them at a crossroads: they can either decide to be a troubled family—and probably fall apart—or try to be a family with some problems, which is quite a distinction. I guess I'd like to think they'll make a run for the latter.
Q: You address the problem of what has been called "jealous mommy syndrome", when a mother becomes envious of the relationship her children are having with their nanny. In the end, A Perfect Arrangement seems to speak against having a live-in nanny who takes on most of the mothering roles. What are your thoughts on this?
SB: I'm definitely not speaking against live-in nannies. Working couples today lead extremely complex and demanding lives and they need help in raising their children. Nannies have been around for a long time and most of them are reliable, competent and caring people who perform an essential service.
The problem lies in our expectations of ourselves vis-à-vis work and family. A certain amount of domestic and emotional chaos is inevitable when you are trying to meet the demands of career and family—but I don't think that most people expect that. They expect to have it all work smoothly, sensibly, and sometimes they become very disillusioned when it doesn't. Currently, there is very little support in the professional world for people with young children. There aren't any guidelines eiether. SO working couples have to make it up as they go along, finding solutions and making making mistakes as they search for ways to balance their need to have jobs and their need to have a family. I don't think having one should cancel out the other. But people must be realistic about the fact that having both is hard and requires all sorts of compromises , some of which you just can't anticipate.
As for "jealous mommy syndrome," I suppose that best way to cope with envy toward a childcare provider is to admit it, discuss it honestly with the provider and, if necessary, change the arrangements. In the book, Mirella ignores what's going on at home until she's literally stuck in the middle of it—and by then thing shave gotten quite out of hand.
Q: Which genre did you work in first, fiction or essay? How did you find the transition? Now, as an author of both, do you find it difficult to go back and forth? Does working in one genre inspire the other?
SB: I began writing fiction in college and published my first story when I was a senior. Then I graduated, and my first job (besides waitressing) was at a small weekly newspaper. So by necessity I made the transition from writing fiction to nonfiction pretty quickly—especially as my first job at that newspaper was writing up the classified ads. Later on I began writing book reviews and personal essays.
What the book reviews in particular taught me was how to structure an argument, something that has proved invaluable to me as a fiction writer. There's always an argument running through a good piece of fiction, I discovered, but it has to be implicit rather than explicit. Going back and forth between essays and fiction keeps me aware of the essential demands of argument. In my view, these demands are: introduce a problem; establish a context within which to understand that problem; then engage the reader by surprising him, by foiling his expectations, by telling him something he thought he knew in a way that persuades him to look at it quite differently.
Q: How did winning the Orange Prize for A Crime in the Neighborhood influence your writing of A Perfect Arrangement? Was there more pressure in writing the second book then the first, or vice versa?
SB: I had already written a first draft of A Perfect Arrangement by the time I won the Orange Prize, so I didn't really feel more pressure than I was already putting on myself. Winning a prize is always gratifying, and I certainly appreciated the boost in confidence it gave me.
Q: How much of your life experience do you put into your fiction? How much are the characters in A Perfect Arrangement based on your life?
SB: The answer is both none and everything. I do not use incidents or situations from my own life in my novels, nor do I base my character on people I know. On the other hand, everything in those novels comes from my perception of the world I live in
Q: What are you working on now? Can we expect more fiction soon?
SB: I am just finishing a collection of short stories and I'm also working on another novel. SO with any luck two new books within the next few years.
Excerpted from A Perfect Arrangement © Copyright 2008 by Suzanne Berne. Reprinted with permission by Plume. All rights reserved.
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