In her lush debut, The Balcony, author Jane Delury offers readers wide-angle and macrocosmic glimpses of life in and around a French manor house over the course of more than a century. A novel-in-stories, The Balcony examines the changing fortunes of families who’ve come and gone over the manor’s history, looking both at the occupants of the main house as well as those who’ve lived in the cottage on the grounds of the estate. Both the fictional village of Benneville and the surrounding woods carry with them a particular darkness, one that’s born of the natural world (the dense woods and the cold winters) and of the people who’ve lived (and died) there.
I recently emailed Delury to ask about her time living and studying in France, about the book’s bilingual ease, and about where she felt she had the most license to stray off historical and geographical fact.
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Nate Brown: The Balcony uses a physical location—a manor house, its cottage, and its grounds, in the fictional French village of Benneville—as its locus. Each of the stories is set here, and the stories don’t appear in chronological order. It’s a pleasure to experience the location in this way: to learn who lived there when, to see characters recur or recede. But I imagine it could be difficult to draft or, at least, to order the stories in the book. How did you compose the book, and how did you decide the order of the stories?
Jane Delury: I’d been writing and publishing stories about a forest in Central France for over a decade without thinking of them as a book. Only one of these stories included a manor house, although several of them took place in a cottage. When I laid all these stories out (literally, on a long table during a writing retreat), I saw a central connection and a new protagonist: an estate that was made up of the manor house and a servants’ cottage. I wanted to tell the story of that estate over a century, while respecting the integrity of the individual stories and their characters. First, I culled the stories that could tell that greater story best. (Some of the original stories were fabulist, and these had to go, as I knew that this would be a work of realism. Other stories only referred to the forest anecdotally.) I wrote a new opening story, “Au Pair,” which gave me the narrative perspective on the estate’s history and narrowed my field of characters. I then rewrote the original stories extensively, weaving in characters who did not necessarily reappear in the published versions. I folded other characters together, and cut out secondary characters. A set of families emerged who had lived in the manor and in the cottage. Their history fed the history of the estate.
The order of the stories came from spontaneity/impulse and a sense of flow but also the practical concern of telling the story of the estate. In terms of flow, I wanted to set the historical stories against more contemporary stories. This was partially a question of style, but also reflects a central question in the novel: Can you ever escape the past?
Practically speaking, I tried to pace the information that the reader would encounter about the characters chapter-to-chapter. I wanted the reader to put together a puzzle and to come to the end of the novel-in-stories knowing more than any one of the characters. Life is a jumbled mess. We have moments of epiphany and understanding about ourselves and others and those moments are important. Mostly, though, it’s a sorting through and piecing together and striving for personal truth and rethinking those truths with the lens of passed time. The structure of the book reflects that belief.
NB: Having never been to France and knowing only a little French myself, I Googled various terms and locations as I read. It was only then that I realized that I was dealing with both locations (and, in some cases, people) real and imagined. Did you feel obligated to retain certain elements of French history? When did you feel you could exercise the most or the least license?
JD: I felt that I could take the most license with the more contemporary stories, as they drew from my own lived experience in France. There, even if someone might say, “The French don’t do that,” I could think, “But the French people that I’ve known do.” I did hire a freelance French editor to read the manuscript with an eye on anachronisms, French-to-English translations, and cultural “errors.” Some of questions she raised resulted from her own family background versus the background of the family I’d known, my ex-husband’s family. For instance, statistically, most French children don’t call their parents by their first names, but in the France that I knew—the France of the left—they did. I tried to contextualize more in these cases.
I think that I felt the least license in writing about World War II. That period contains the turn for the novel, as the estate is plundered by the villagers of Benneville. The war is a tricky time in French history. There’s still a great deal of shame over the Collaboration, and for good reason. But there is a good deal of pride over the Resistance, also for good reason. I wanted to recognize both elements of that period and to be fair. Here, I went back to my characters and their individual realities. What would each one of them do when faced with the Occupation? Who would resist? Who would collaborate? Who would do what most of us do and simply live out their daily lives? Answering those questions gave me the freedom I needed to write about that period.
NB: The plundering of the estate resonates loudly in the book, both because we’ve got the historical context to understand it as part of the broader story: the story of WWII, the spread of fascism and anti-Semitism, the purging of minority communities by western Europeans. Given the political climate in parts of Europe, including Italy and France, the plundering of the estate is doubly haunting. At the time that you wrote this section, were you thinking of it primarily as a descriptive look at a dark period of French history, or did you also have in mind the contemporary parallels to xenophobia, greed, and racism?
JD: Definitely. The horrors of WWII were a systematic manifestation of the same bigotry that has always existed and still exists in Europe, yes, but also in the USA. We are currently living under a regime that draws its strength from the idea of “the other.” When I lived in France, I definitely saw racism and anti-Semitism in action but no more than I do here at home. A person’s work always reflects their preoccupations, even the subconscious ones, and like many people these days, I spend a lot of time being aghast at the state of the world and of our politics.
NB: The book doesn’t just shift in time dramatically, but your prose style changes subtly from story to story. The diction is relatively more formal in those stories set in the late 19th century and early half of the 20th century while the stories set later utilize contemporary dialogue and diction. Still, the book as a whole feels stylistically consistent. Was this a result of revision to sort of standardize your style or tone?
JD: You’re right! And yes, this was an issue in revising the book. Writing “Au Pair” was helpful, because it set the tone of the overall narrative for me, a middle-ground between the romantic and the hard-nosed. As you’ve pointed out, some of my earlier, historical stories had a gentler tone with much longer sentences, more informed by French syntax, than did my later stories. As I revised the book, I tried to even out the overall voice from story to story. At the same time, I did want the reader to experience different kinds of narrative spaces as they moved through the chapters, so sometimes I had to backpedal on my cutting and revising and let the original inform the revision more. It was a balancing act.
NB: So many of these stories employ French fluidly and don’t explicitly provide translation for the reader. Using context, we can mostly suss out what’s going on or being said, but I enjoyed that I had to do a little bit of work, too. Were you concerned at all about the use of French in the book?
JD: The original draft of The Balcony contained less quoted French, and my editor, Jean Garnett, suggested that I include more. Once I let myself use more French, I knew that it was right for the voice of the book. I also knew that there was a risk in using the French, similar to the risk in structuring the book non-chronologically. There’s a delicate line between respecting your reader’s intelligence and losing your reader. I tried not to be smarty pants about the use of French, or to include any French that would exclude a reader who didn’t know that language. I relied on context, sly translations, and the input of my non-French-speaking readers. Anyone who has lived in two languages knows that there is always a gap between the thing said and the translation of the thing said. When I was drafting and my French characters spoke to each other in French, I thought the words in French and translated as I wrote. It’s always an approximation.
NB: Your familiarity with and knowledge of French and of French culture lend the book a palpable intimacy with the language and the places described. I’m curious to know how other Francophiles may have responded to the book and how any French friends or relatives have reacted. Have you had any particularly good, bad, or surprising reactions?
JD: Francophiles have been quite kind about the book, although some of them wished I’d shown more of the happy side of France. That France exists and is wonderful to visit with its lavender fields and gorgeous architecture. But I wanted to write about the France I knew, a more day-to-day France of less bucolic settings. As for relatives, I wrote some of the original stories when I belonged to my ex-husband’s French family. They always respected that I wrote fiction that strayed from the autobiographical. But it’s been tricky in interviews to keep a respectful distance from that source material.
NB: It’s funny: I can easily imagine individual chapters of this book appearing as single stories in a journal and, in fact, many have appeared in really great journals. But I can’t quite imagine the book with any single chapter missing. Not all of the stories intersect, of course, but it’s a tightly composed book that really does function like a novel. I almost hate to ask this because it’s become a cliché to note that place can function as character, but The Balcony really is like a novel that’s about this manor. The people come and go, but the place abides. Do you think of this as a novel or as a linked collection? Does it ultimately matter to you whether it’s more one than the other?
JD: I do think of the book as a novel-in-stories, not really a novel, not exactly a story collection. The “chapters” are also stories. I suppose the novel-in-stories is a subset of the linked collection, one with a clear narrative through line, a novelistic arc. I love short stories. I love what they can do in a small space. I love the sudden burst and concision. I also love the slower, quieter roll of a novel. I was trying to fuel the book with both energies.
Jane Delury‘s fiction has appeared in Narrative, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and Glimmer Train. She has received a PEN/O. Henry Prize, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Award, a VCCA fellowship, and grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. She holds an MA in literary studies from the University of Grenoble, France, and an MA in fiction from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She teaches in the University of Baltimore’s MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program.