The title of Jonathan Buckley’s book Tell is a cruel joke: the book’s title promises disclosure but only delivers such a thin, ghostly thread of a narrative that it begs the question: just what is being told here?
The premise of the book is as follows: Curtis, an unspeakably wealthy entrepreneur, has a large staff tending to his home. The whole book is an interview with his gardener that reads somewhat like a deposition, but is presumably for a film adaptation of the rich man’s life. The gardener delves into the intimate dramas of Curtis’ love life, the conflict between members of the staff, an accident that seems to damage Curtis’ memory, the bad habits and suspicious behaviours of Curtis’ children and their partners, and so on. There are a few key events that seem to be important: the death of Lily, Curtis’ first wife, Curtis’ art-buying habits under Karolina’s guidance, the journalist Lara writing a book about Curtis, Curtis finding his birth mother, and a strange series of dinners.
The entire book is presented as an extended monologue and its format poses a number of questions. First, why is the gardener being interviewed? Second, why is the gardener telling these particular stories that lack a cohesive throughline? Then, there are the sections in the transcript that are listed as inaudible or incomprehensible. How was this interview conducted? How could there be gaps like this?
Buckley’s novel is one where the central issues are relegated to the background. We do not know until the book is very nearly over (think: 15 pages left), the reason for the investigation. While I was initially drawn in by the voice of the novel, which feels so natural and authentic, around the halfway mark I started wondering just where this story was going. I felt something was amiss, but wanted to know more and that desire to know did produce a certain kind of frustration. In a way, Tell is a mystery in the same way that Patrick Modiano’s books are mysteries: there is a mystery, but you’re not quite sure what the mystery actually is. It’s like a secret’s secret why it matters.
Ultimately, it is revealed that Curtis went missing. Prior to his disappearance, the gardener notes some strange behaviours, like Curtis hosting two dinners framed as The Last Supper (but twice). She also notes that the employees all received five-figure bonuses at Christmas time, which was highly unusual. Then, in January, Curtis has mysterious phone calls where he seems angry. His son drives to the estate in the middle of a snow storm. Curtis spends the night in an on-property cabin, but then disappears without a trace, either into the ocean or disappearing by electric car to (maybe) be spotted in various countries around the world (maybe) on the verge of suicide. The gardener holds out hope for Curtis’ return throughout, making statements about what he might do later with his artwork (a gallery? A big sale?). The gardener keeps noting that “we’ll see” what might happen.
Admittedly, after finishing the book I wanted to see what the prevailing theories were—unfortunately there’s not much out there. Of course, I suspect that I’ve fallen into Buckley’s trap of wanting to know. Buckley offers incisive commentary about storytelling here about what stories resonate and why. For instance, Curtis tells a story that clearly resonated with him, lest he wouldn’t tell it at a dinner with his staff. An adopted girl grows into a woman and tries to make her biological father, who could not cope with having a baby on his own (her mom died a few days after she was born). The gardener summarizes their emotional reunion and how they got along so well together. They start looking over photos of her growing up and spend a few hours going through pictures. The gardener notes how “they come to this one photo, taken at a funfair, of herself with the adoptive father, both of them holding candyfloss. Her father, the biological father, is looking at this picture, and suddenly he turns white. There are tears in his eyes, and she thinks it must be because it upsets him, seeing his daughter with this man who had taken his place. It must be hard” (135). The daughter misinterprets the significance of the piece, “But that’s not it. That’s not what’s going on” (135). I’ll pause briefly here to note that Buckley shows how the significance of stories varies from person to person and that when we tell a story we don’t know why it might resonate. As it turns out, the two of them were in the same photo. Her biological father is in the background waiting for a ride and lighting a cigarette: “Fifteen years ago, they’d been standing just a few feet from each other, at exactly that moment, when the shutter was pressed. Exactly the same spot, exactly the same time” (135). The gardener says she teared up, and so did Curtis. The gardener’s question is our own: “Why has he told us this? Because I knew he’d been fostered, and Lara had told us about his mother, so I really didn’t know what to make of it. You couldn’t help thinking that there were connections to be made” (135).
Yes, connections. What is the thread that brings everything together? This is much harder to identify due to the frailty of the human mind and our powers of perception.
Just past the halfway mark of the book, the gardener describes a crime that took place to illustrate how weak our powers of perception are. In her words, “Eyewitness often doesn’t mean much. My son-in-law, Jack, one time, he stepped in to stop this chap beating up another chap” (99). The story goes on about the conflict and “All Jack could say when the police asked him about it was that the man was about his height and had dark hair. Turned out he had half an ear missing and a huge blue star tattooed on his neck, but Jack hadn’t noticed. Shock, that is. It messes the brain up” (99). The anecdote undermines, in some ways, the whole story the gardener is telling. The gardener is giving a firsthand account of the events leading up to Curtis’ disappearance—but if we acknowledge the frailty of human memory, how can we trust the gardener any more? She notes the following:
you remember someone doing something, years back, and you know it happened more or less as you recall, that it was this person who did this thing in this way, but can you describe them, like you can describe someone who was in front of you an hour ago? You can’t. Your mind’s eye is seeing them, but you can’t describe them. The mind’s eye isn’t an eye. It’s not that kind of picture you’re getting. Not really a picture at all. Even the person you saw an hour ago. You can’t see them like someone who’s there. The fade-out happens right away. It’s what the police always say. (99)
Thus, we have a paradox here. The person we most rely on to describe events as they were admits outright that it’s impossible to describe someone from even an hour ago. Thus, the underlying assumptions of a story—that it is ordered, that it has a logic based on relevant details—are called into question, since even the relevant details cannot be recalled precisely by any measure.
Tell, then, seems to suggest that stories a kind of curatorial process and that the narrative is always implied. I think it’s significant that Curtis is a kind of gallerist who accumulates unrelated artworks: “the pictures were just there, like family photos on the mantelpiece. Once in a while you might give them a glance, but you don’t really look. You know them. You take them for granted” (125). Curtis’ collections stand on their own rather than being in direct conversation or systematized. The gardener describes one particular artwork of a small town somewhere in America. Notably, it’s a work that has an implied narrative. There’s a car in the road with its doors open and its bonnet all smashed up. Someone is walking behind it, not paying attention. If we consider this a kind of story, it’s interesting that the gardener says “At first glance you’d think it was a real scene, but then you realize it’s all staged” (125).There are all kinds of details and “the more you looked, the more you saw. It made you think of a whodunnit, but you couldn’t even work out what exactly had been done” (125). To me, this is exactly the project of Tell. It’s a whodunnit, but also a whatsdunn. None of it is brought into a cohesive, unproblematic story. And that which is presented is curated to such an extent that even accidents seem staged.
The curation of stories is central to the text. As we’ve already discussed, the stories people tell gain significance based on who is telling, who the audience is, and so on. Yet, the lack of systematization of these vignettes, combined with the failings of human faculties, creates a context where the curatorial project of stories falls apart, which is most evident in Curtis’ dissatisfaction with how his life story is being told. The gardener notes towards the end of the novel that some conflicts may have been emerging with the novelization of Curtis’ life: “And there was a bigger issue, which was that she had him saying things he was adamant he hadn’t actually said. Putting words into his mouth. That was the main complaint” (138). Further, “Curtis wasn’t happy with Lara’s methods [...] We know she didn’t record every conversation. She recorded a few, but often she just took notes and wrote them up afterwards. Sometimes there weren’t even notes” (138). These areas create a kind of slippage in telling stories. The lack of documentation makes replication and systematization nearly impossible. The gardener challenges their driver (Asil) a few times throughout the novel, painting him in a bad light for quitting and possibly having an affair with Lara. Yet, Asil says Lara “could have jotted down the notes a week after the chat and they would still have been spot-on, because she had an amazing memory for speech. [...] Like a photographic memory, but for words” (138). The gardener says she “can’t remember exactly what [she] said five minutes ago” (again the whole account is dubious) but that Lara “could remember things [Asil had] said when he picked her up from the airport for the very first time, before the accident, as if it had happened the day before, not a couple of years back” (138). Inconsistent memory is in and of itself reason enough to call accounts into question, but Buckley takes it one step further. Asil says that Lara has an infallible memory, “but if we’re going to take that as the truth, it has to mean that Asil has a superhuman memory too, because if he couldn’t remember it himself, how could he know that she was remembering it properly? See what I mean? I suppose he could say that he remembered it when she told him what she remembered. It brought it all back. But that still begs the question, no?” (138). It’s a worthwhile exploration of what it means to remember. Is memory something that can be immediately recalled? How much of what we remember is implanted in us by someone else’s account?
Let’s assume for a moment that we can remember everything flawlessly. Let’s also assume that we have curated stories for the correct context. Other issues still remain: namely, that we cannot choose what to hear. There’s a lengthy passage where the gardener talks about dreams. The passage begins with a discussion of how when people first researched peoples’ dreams they reported seeing them in black and white. Fifty years later, they asked people and a vast majority said they dreamt in colour. The theory was that colour television influenced people to switch but according to the gardener now things have switched back and people are dreaming in black and white. When attempting to explain the phenomenon, the gardener says, “What’s going on? It’s not possible that we used to dream in black and white, then switched to colour, then switched back. What’s the explanation? It has to be a problem with the way we report on what’s happening inside our own heads, doesn’t it?” (73). She continues to note that dreams can never be described fully: “Somebody speaks to you in a dream. It’s someone you knew years ago. You recognize her face. But what was she wearing in the dream? What colour was her hair. You don’t know. A face appeared, that’s all. Or something that felt like a face” (73). The gardener then contrasts this hazy phenomenon with reality, suggesting that if someone in real life had the same interaction with you, you would be able to say something about how things were: “you’d know, because you saw it” (73). But is this really the case? The gardener has noted that memory fades even moments after an interaction, particularly intense ones. In turn, our whole realities turn into a kind of dream, which explains why we can’t explain what happened to Curtis.
Where does that leave us? Something like intuition. In that same passage, the gardener says, “It’s like if someone tells you to picture a triangle. You can imagine a triangle, but it’s not a triangle you can measure. You can’t measure the sides or the angles. It’s just a vague idea of a triangle. You ‘see’ it, but you don’t see it. Same when you think of someone’s face” (73-74). All of Tell is like seeing without seeing. You know there’s a narrative there and you can intuit it, but can you actually describe what the reality is? After all, “It’s not a crisp image. More like an afterimage, or a dream. You’re not really seeing. It has a kind of reality, but it’s not a reality with any substance” (74).
Perhaps we’d be able to create a narrative for ourselves—but we don’t even understand ourselves. The gardener reflects on the phrase “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and complicates the idea. Trying to parse the meaning, she reflects, “Is it saying we have to love everyone? And what if you don’t love yourself? Does that mean it’s OK not to love other people? But how can you love yourself?” (121). She posits that this idea of loving thyself is impossible because we can’t even have a sense of ourselves. She asks, “How can you even see yourself, never mind love yourself? You can examine an object, because the object isn’t you. But how can you examine yourself? What’s doing the looking? It’s you, yourself. So what examines the thing that’s doing the looking? It’s like asking an eyeball to look at itself without a mirror. There’s no mirror. And so on” (121). There’s a kind of process where we need to exteriorize our own experiences in order to make sense of them, but the reality is that we’re never separate from ourselves. We don’t have the capacity for introspection that telling, for example, a life story, would require.
This harkens back to the idea that Curtis is not pleased when he sees the externalized version of himself, the version created for his biography. A vignette in the novel reinforces the idea. Curtis is touring Lara around places that hold supposedly special memories. He takes her to his adoptive parents’ childhood home and makes a false display of reverence towards it. As they drove away, “Nothing more was said about the Coopers. The conversation was mostly about Lara’s life. As if to redress the balance. Like he was saying: ‘I’ve talked about me. Now it’s your go’” (102). He deflects the storytelling process to an external body. She goes on so much about herself that she became bored by herself and then she wonders whether that is what wisdom feels like: “Achieving indifference to the past” (121). This is a problem for Curtis, though; the idea that “so much of it had become flat and monochrome. No texture, no flavour. Fossilized, almost. What he was remembering, in many cases, was just the facts of what had happened. If that. The externals, not the interior” (102). While the gardener suggests that we can never truly see ourselves or observe ourselves from the outside, Curtis seems to have achieved it and finds himself dissatisfied. He is purely external to himself and starts to see memories “Like a stack of empty boxes [...] Incidents that he’d talked about before had become boxes, many of them neatly labelled, but with nothing inside” (102).
I have to apologize here, as well, because there was a passage in the book about how we can train our eyes to look at something, but we can’t train our ears to listen. I feel like that ineptitude is critical to the project of the book, as well.
If I were to summarize the central conceit of the book, I would suggest it’s a kind of impossibility of forming a cohesive narrative. To reconstruct the argument, we can never really know ourselves. In turn, we can’t know why certain stories resonate or why we recount particular vignettes, much less predict what others’ responses will do to give them meaning. Even if this were possible, we would not know how to focus our attention or have enough memory for the details to transform isolated experiences into meaningful narratives, and even if we could do that, Buckley seems to suggest a kind of emptiness to complete narratives, as reflected in Curtis’ failures to curate meaningful stories.
Tell mimics these frustrations. In reading the gardener’s meandering narrative, you are immersed in these very contradictions in storytelling. As much as is disclosed, more remains behind. I think there’s a great conceptual project here, but you’ll need to be prepared for a lack of resolution.
Now, all that said, if you want to read this book and tell me what happened I would be very curious to know your thoughts.
Happy reading!
