The opening paragraph of Lorna Mott Comes Home, Diane Johnson’s first novel in over a decade, sets the tone for the rest of the book. The very morning that Lorna Mott Dumas means to flee her philandering French second husband and return to the United States, hard rains upend the graveyard of the village of Pont-les-Puits. Johnson writes: “In the darkness during last night’s heavy rains, the cemetery had dislodged itself and with the stealth of a nocturnal predator slid five hundred meters downhill, where the astonished citizens this morning had discovered a huge, sticky hillock of treacherous clay, burst coffins, broken stones, corpses, and bones.” Only the oldest tombs remain standing “with unseeing dignity above the sacrilegious chaos.”
This image, grim as it is, provides a taut symbolic center from which the rest of Johnson’s novel, her 18th, gracefully unspools. The settled remains of Lorna’s life are upended by her husband’s voracious libido and scattered across two continents. Lorna, an aging art critic heading toward the twilight of her career, decides to return home to San Francisco and her three distant and mildly disappointing adult children. Harboring fantasies of an America full of open, kind faces, enchiladas, and a comforting informality, Lorna instead finds a country barely recognizable after 20 years in the French countryside. She “had remembered America differently,” writes Johnson, “without people lying in the street, neighbors being tied up and robbed, junk food, obesity, cars everywhere.” Vacillating between mild disappointment and abject horror at the state of her homeland, Lorna plunges herself into the minor dramas of her family and stares down what appears to be the denouement of her career. Hope is still alive, but the accumulated ruins of her past are as disturbingly exposed as the muddy skeletons strewn over the potter’s field in Pont-les-Puits.
Probably best known for her Francophile early 21st-century works such as Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L’Affaire, Johnson is perennially underappreciated by readers who turn to her expecting rom-com beach reads. Sure, Le Divorce was turned into a somewhat popular movie starring Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts. But don’t let her popular successes fool you. Johnson is readable and entertaining, but she is also one of America’s foremost practitioners of the now unfortunately niche art of the comedy of manners, more Edith Wharton than Helen Fielding. With a dry sensibility and a cold, observant eye, Johnson uses her books to vivisect class and social standing, both. What we’re left with in Lorna Mott Comes Home is an exacting and often hilarious portrait of cold, white California Episcopalians. The characters are so marooned within themselves that one is reminded of an old anecdote about the origins of the taciturn Yankee: They started out believing that a person could only truly be intimate with God, and then, when they stopped believing in God, they carried on believing that intimacy is impossible with everyone else. Take, for example, the exchange between granddaughter Julie and her grandfather, Lorna’s first husband, Randall Mott, on seeing each other for the first time in three years:
“I really hope I’m not disturbing you, Grandpa Ran.”
“We don’t see enough of you Julie, tell me what brings you.”
I have warmer interactions each week with strangers at the grocery store. But don’t assume that the coldness and money obsession — there seems to be a scarcity mentality among the Mott children, without any accompanying desire to seek steady work — are all there is to this novel, which is enlivened throughout by Johnson’s wholly underrated sense of humor. This is a very, very funny book. One of the best scenes comes during Lorna’s first American art history lecture in years, at a random event center in Bakersfield. The topic is the medieval Apocalypse Tapestry of Angers, France. The lecture does not go well:
“The Bakersfield audience had been polite and receptive, but somehow, during the question period, things had fallen apart. When she had referred to a numerical figure in one of the tapestries, a man had stood up, waited for the microphone to be passed to him, then shouted ‘Six-six-six is the mark of the Beast.’
‘Six-six-six refers to Nero,’ Lorna began. She had tried to explain that the people of Saint John’s era, afraid to mention their Roman oppressors by name, had employed euphemisms like ‘Beast’. But, ignoring her completely, somebody immediately shouted down the original speaker, saying the Beast was Satan, as everybody knew, and moreover the Beast was nigh.
‘We are in the Last Days,’ he whispered into the portable microphone.
‘We are not,’ from someone else. Bakersfield was likely to be inundated, and soon. No, it would not. Destroyed by storms. No, drought. She found herself in the midst of a sectarian quarrel which engaged more and more members of the audience, people flinging esoteric biblical trivia instead of, as she had imagined they would, questions about the practical problems of getting to Angers, France, or which were her favorite restaurants in Paris.”
The scene continues to devolve, along with Lorna’s expectations of her home country, now turned strange by time and distance. Her agent considers the event a success and promises to try to book her in Fresno.
Through the books, the art history and family issues, the disappointing children, and the shallow materialism (Will Ran’s new rich wife bestow her largess on the children from his previous marriage? Does Ran even care if she does?), what eventually emerges from Lorna Mott Comes Home is a wry and at times even heartfelt portrait of an older woman holding out hope for joy. Maybe we can’t escape the past, and maybe the graveyard has upended unpleasantly into the present, but one can nonetheless keep hope aflame. Did Lorna make the right move in returning to America to tend that fire?
“Of course she didn’t believe that ‘all that’ was behind them, didn’t think that life — erotic, artistic, professional — was over for people of any age. … Here she thought of Armand-Loup, so robustly sensual, so emphatically rooted in the mire of the physical: sex, cassoulet, a good Bordeaux. Not ‘mire,’ wrong word — but pleasure. Pleasure in the physical. Now with a packet of blue pills, but still with cheerful vigor, even joy. Joy seemed in short supply hereabouts. Was there more joy in France than in America?”
Johnson seems to think not. And after reading her hilarious and sad comedy of manners, we share her doubt.
Scott Beauchamp is an editor for Landmarks, the journal of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. His most recent book is Did You Kill Anyone?
