“Rules for Visiting” and the Dangers of Sentimentalism

By Paul Oliver

May Attaway, the fastidious narrator of Jessica Francis Kane’s new novel, “Rules for Visiting,” embarks on a journey to visit four old friends after her employer, a university in small-town Anneville, awards her a long leave from her job as a groundskeeper. Contrived inciting incident and possible underlying depression aside, May faces a rather common feeling of unrest: she is having a midlife crisis.

May visits her four old friends—Lindy, Vanessa, Neera, and Rose—to avoid the people closest to her, the people to whom she should dedicate her attention. These characters include her friend Leo (a budding love interest), her father, her coworker Sue, and her estranged brother. May prefers maudlin conversations with old friends to direct ones with the people who love her. She believes that “your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself and that’s what I’m after.” (Tony Soprano would tell May that“‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”) The thing May lacks, though, despite her contemplative nature, is a precise sense of self. She feels lonely because she doesn’t know who she is—she never recovered from her mother’s death, and Kane wants the reader to sympathize with May’s condition as a single, middle-aged woman. Only in the final pages of the novel does May begin to foster the important relationships, the perennial ones (Leo, her dad). In this sense, the novel gestures towards a restorative sentiment, but too little too late.

Lindy’s daughter tells May, “My mom says you’re sad because you’re too old to have children.” Vanessa asks May why she’s still single. Indeed, May lives alone with only a cat for a companion (well, sort-of—she lives with her ailing father in her childhood home, the same home in which her mother suffered a tragic death). She’s inept with social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram bewilder her. And she’s the type of person who has a name for her car. Bonnie.

May buys a suitcase before taking off to Connecticut, Seattle, New York, and London, and she names it Grendel. Instead of inviting readers to savor this potentially clever allusion, Kane foists a gluttonous binge upon them. She includes a page-long summary of Beowulf before making a didactic pronouncement: “Without friendship, you become Grendel. Many people don’t marry and many don’t have children. Some people might not know their mother or father, and a lot of people don’t have siblings. But any person who has lived for any length of time has had a friend. Except Grendel, and he became the first monster in English literature.” Few readers will tolerate this general didacticism and unfortunately, this instance is indicative of Kane’s consistent impulse to veer from narration to preaching. Some of the book’s didactic elements work better than others. May’s explanations of different tree species stand out as meaningful; trees, in discursive sections, function as overt symbols in “Rules for Visiting” as whales and whaling function symbolically in “Moby-Dick.” (I do not mean to imply through this comparison of function that trees succeed as symbols in “Rules for Visiting” as much as whales do in “Moby-Dick”; many novels— “The Overstory” immediately comes to mind—employ trees as symbols far more effectively than “Rules for Visiting.”)

While May’s musings about trees augment the story with some purpose, her contemplations of literature do not. Kane saturates “Rules for Visiting” with heavy-handed allusions even more than she saturates her narrator’s name with assonance (May Attaway—say that three times fast). Kane neglects the purpose of allusion—she overexplains and oversimplifies canonical literary and classical texts (especially “Beowulf” and “The Odyssey”). Quoted aphorisms and overwrought sentiments from a plethora of literary greats (including Woolf, Dickens, Austen, Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, and many more—far too many to list) shroud Kane’s own voice, a voice which emerges much more distinctly in her short stories.

In “Rules for Visiting,” however, Kane indulges in downright patronizing phrases, even apart from arboreal or literary subjects. In one instance, May tells the reader, “In conflicts around the world, it’s very important who controls the road to the airport. Sometimes the road is shut down and that’s always a sign the conflict is escalating.” Does Kane really need to show May being this contemplative, or does Kane think her reader doesn’t comprehend basic logistics? If May were a more cosmopolitan narrator (and not so effete), rumination of this sort might be more palatable. I am thinking of Teju Cole’s Open City —the worldly narrator in that book imparts valuable and rare knowledge to the reader during his travels.

But the novel’s didacticism is only a symptom of its pervasive disease: sentimentalism. Kane presents May as a pitiable lonesome middle-aged woman, desperate for even the tiniest bits of intimacy. She fixates on postcards, tiny gifts, and, of course, etiquette. (“A trip is a journey or an excursion, but it can also be a stumble or misstep. To avoid the latter, I
bought a copy of Emily Post’s ‘Etiquette,’ which confirmed my strengths as a guest.”) The novel includes mawkish refrains in dialogue like “Poor May” and “Oh, May.” Rules for Visiting misses an opportunity to celebrate female solitude (and friendship); instead, Kane laments May’s loneliness and asks readers to do the same. Zoë Heller, in a New York Times piece called “Should Writers Avoid Sentimentality?” says, “Sentimental fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art. One reason, surely, why readers throw down books when they don’t contain sufficiently ‘likable’ characters is that their tolerance for any sort of moral challenge—for being asked, say, to sympathize with homeless little boys who are godless and truculent and a bit smelly—has been eroded by too many fairy tales masquerading as adult literature.”

At least Kane doesn’t cast May as likable and pitiable—only the latter. But the real danger of sentimentalism—which Heller implies—is that it’s innocuous until it isn’t. May’s sentimentalism stops being innocuous in an airport bar. She sees television news coverage reporting that “another black man had been shot by a white person in uniform.” She describes the incident in detail, and she witnesses a white man pay for a black man’s drink at the bar (who shakes his head in response). All of this provokes some pondering from May: “My visiting plan included three white, one brown (Neera is half Iranian), and no black women. I regretted this imbalance and wished it were otherwise. I’d had a chance. A girl named Danielle Belieu…the only person I knew who lived in an apartment building…the only black girl in the fifth grade.” May recalls trying to befriend Danielle as an adult on Facebook after feeling remorseful for avoiding her in school because of the color of her skin. Here’s where sentimentalism gets dangerous: “The first year I was on Facebook I found her and sent her a message. She responded, I wrote back, and I never heard from her again. Sometimes the door to friendship doesn’t open as far as you think it might, and you’re vulnerable standing there on the threshold, not yet in or out. It was uncomfortable online, and Danielle had endured the feeling in real life.” At best Kane’s treatment of racial conflict here is inelegant, but at worst it resembles the white moderate attitude Martin Luther King, Jr. decries in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” To present a narrator who exhibits racist behavior does not inherently merit condemnation, but Kane equates May’s discomfort at an ignored Facebook message to Danielle’s experience of inequitable treatment as a child. In doing so, Kane asks the reader to sympathize with May’s racist behavior in the same way she asks the reader to sympathize with her avoidant tendencies.

Maybe this problem reflects a more fundamental one: “Rules for Visiting” brims with so much earnestness that it leaves no room for irony or humor. Its sentimentality indulges self- righteousness. Even with its abundant flaws, “Rules for Visiting” will probably make you want to call an old friend or two. But if you feel compelled to abide by prescriptive rules when visiting a friend, is that person really a friend?