Topical Guide 540
Mark Dorset
Characters and Characterization
Donna Seaman, “Reservations Recommended”, Booklist:
Matthew Barber is an executive in a toy company by day and a restaurant reviewer by night. Writing for the trendy set in Boston under the pseudonym B. W. Beath, he smugly assesses the dining scene, briefly escaping the problems of the real-life Matthew. Each chapter centers on a restaurant meal at which Matthew struggles with his self-consciousness while making mental notes for his review and eavesdropping on other tables. These dining scenes are [. . .] perceived through Matthew’s inner skirmish between his insecurity and B. W.’s sophistication. Matthew, we observe, is hurt by his wife’s departure after 14 years of marriage and is trying to remake himself, with little success. His reviews become more and more personal; they’re about what happens between him and his guests rather than about the restaurant. The war between his two personalities intensifies until [. . .]
Me, Mark Dorset: I’d like to return to your treatment of Matthew Barber and your attitude toward him.
Peter Leroy: You’d “like to”?
MD: I feel that I have to, that I “ought” to.
PL: Okay.
MD: He’s on a downward curve. Why have you put him there?
PL: Be careful about spoilers, please.
MD: Okay. Sorry.
PL: He’s not entirely subject to my control. Recall that in the preface to Reservations Recommended I said that I wondered what he would be like as an adult, and what his life would be like.
MD: I recall. Of course.
PL: So Reservations Recommended is the report of a thought experiment.
MD: Okay. I feel that you’re about to try to slip away from accepting responsibility for Matthew’s misery, but go on.
PL: When I think, my mind wanders. I’m not entirely in control of it. I don’t drag it behind me on a leash. Sometimes it takes off after a squirrel and drags me behind it.
MD: So you’re saying that you’re not responsible for Matthew’s misery.
PL: I’m saying, or suggesting, that when I transported the Matthew Barber I remember from the days of our youth into the time and place of Reservations Recommended, he became the Matthew Barber you see there.
MD: Without further help or meddling from you?
PL: I saw the path ahead, but I didn’t see any way—any plausible way—to avoid following it.
MD: Is Reservations Recommended a form of revenge?
PL: Revenge for—?
MD: For his trying to drag you under when you were practicing lifesaving, as you described in the preface? For his trying to drag you into his pessimism when you and he were little boys?
PL: [after a long pause] No. I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m as nasty as that. [after another pause] It could, instead, be a form of help, a lifeline.
MD: How so?
PL: As a cautionary tale. [He hands me a sheet of paper.] You might want to quote this.
Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction:
No one who has been trained, as all of us have been, to honor our “inner selves” in their fullest integrity as the highest good can possibly become characters again without having to face new problems in new ways. Chief of these, for our purposes, is that of deciding whether a proffered new role, encountered in an appealing narrative, is one that we can afford to take on, or ought to take on. Does the concept of “ought” even make sense once I have given up the notion that I can find its validation by appealing to that core, that self, that I have been taught to search for? Can we say any more than that we find our new selves in multiple encounters, hoping that this powerful narrative will supplement or correct that one? Can we hope now to say more than that Don Quixote might have been rescued by reading Don Quixote and that Emma Bovary’s best hope would have been to read Madame Bovary, rather than all those romantic novels and histories?
See also:
Barber, Matthew TG 98
Character as Uncontrollable Creation TG 117
Character Traits: Artless Sincerity versus Malicious Duplicity TG 143; Character Traits: False Modesty, Narcissism, Pugnacity TG 144
Author as God or Magician or Puppeteer TG 17, TG 94, TG 117
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