In the extraordinarily simple novel Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin takes the reader on a journey through the milestones of a lifetime. The protagonist is a woman with potential, opportunities and dreams, who is determined to not have “a small life — a life of mundane concerns, of fulfilled expectations, of commonplaces and banalities, of children’s sore throats, of grandmother’s apple pies, of fussy 19th porcelain — a life within four walls”. Yet as her years advance that is precisely the life she lives.

The story is reflective in nature. Each room gives the girl — who incidentally remains unnamed beyond her married surname “Mrs Caldwell” — moments of choices where, through action or acceptance, she is carried forward into the next phase and the next room of her life. Her muse, a figment of her imagination made real through conversations, tells her early on, “Now, as always, you have a choice. You can spend your days baking cookies for your offspring or — as ever through the ages — you can become a madwoman, a nomad, a warrior, a saint. But if you do decide to follow the way of the few, you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you.” As a young woman and a student it seems as if she will choose the harder path and become a poet — she chooses to turn her back on a pre-arranged life with the son of an influential bureaucrat and travels to America to study. Then, the aspirations of youth are slowly subsumed in the demands of reality.

The course of her 40 rooms is both rapid in that the book traverses infancy to death in around 300 pages, and yet slow in that it is an utterly prosaic existence. She marries, produces children, moves from one house to another, each becoming larger while her flights of fancy become rarer and her muse all but abandons her.

Mrs Caldwell experiences an eminently ordinary life, prosaic, even dull, but it is a life that invites introspection. The reader can relate to many of the rooms and the choices and in a spurt of empathy each choice that restricts the course of Mrs Caldwell’s life has us identifying with her.

The novel is based on the idea that a life is built on compromises, out of adjustments. It is very much a book on women’s choices, women’s lives. The decisions to make drastic changes can shatter the earth, and not every woman, regardless of her capacity to be Mary Wollstonecraft, Gertrude Bell, Joan of Arc or Mother Teresa, can choose those paths. Parental expectations and social pressures result in her accepting a proposal of marriage, her father’s terminal illness and desperation for grandchildren lead her to a life with numerous children and a dog in a mansion. A life of platitudes, something she swore she would not end up with, is exactly what Mrs Caldwell lives and it is a good life, a life with meaning and — as she ages — contentment.

The book is divided into five parts, each with a distinctive mood and tone. The first, titled ‘Mythology’, is set in Russia where the protagonist (and the author) was born and where she imagines a magical future. The second, ‘Past Perfect’, is set in America where Mrs Caldwell (and Grushin) goes to study, and she spends her time in a library learning, but not living. The third part, ‘The Past’, is set in the period of Mrs Caldwell’s courtship, marriage and birth of two children, ending at the point where her husband suggests another move to a bigger house while Mrs Caldwell’s dream house is “a place where you can sleep”. Here she has taken numerous steps which have narrowed her choices and she has come to understand that her pursuit of poetic genius would have to be postponed “for she had other, human, equations to balance first”.

Part four, ‘The Present’, is filled with the minutiae of the life of an affluent housewife. Here Mrs Caldwell realises “An average woman — or at least an average married woman with children, which, for all she knew, no longer signified an average woman; to rephrase, then, a woman average for most of human history — almost certainly devoted more of her time to the pursuit of laundering than to the pursuit of love; yet for all the thousands and thousands of poems written about love, only a handful had ever been written about laundry.” With the present, we see that the talented poetess with myriad fantasies of seeing the world and taking the path less travelled has become mired in the mundane. Where once she had no desire to own anything, she lives in a house with a ballroom and an exercise room. She is in a place where she loves the suburban American house she lives in, but also thinks, “I no longer recognise the shape of my life.”

Of the 40 rooms a woman ostensibly occupies in her life, many are in that chunk of settled adulthood. Each room claims a portion of her time and each narrows the vision she has of herself and her future. The choice of 40 as the magic number is not accidental; an apparition of Mrs Caldwell’s dead mother explains to her aging daughter, “Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Oh, you know what I mean — Noah’s 40 days and nights of rain, Moses’ 40 days in the desert, Jesus’ 40 days of fasting and temptation. Forty of anything is long enough to be a trial, but it’s man-size, too. In the Bible, 40 years make a span of one generation. Forty weeks make a baby.”

Interspersed with bits of original poetry, much of which is quite good, the entire book is an exercise in self-awareness and the epiphany that in every room there is a decision made. The protagonist shows her little son a stone in a Russian fairytale, inscribed with the words, “If you go straight, you’ll find happiness. If you go right, you’ll lose your horse. If you go left, you’ll lose your life.” This present carries her to part five, ‘The Future’, a set of blank pages that follow after she walks “empty-handed toward the shining rectangle of light”.

Grushin makes the mundane interesting. The births and deaths, the achievements — largely material — the banal, take up decades of Mrs Caldwell’s life, as they do with practically all lives, and yet, there is an underlying sense of what could have been which engages the reader. In a moment of brutal truth, the protagonist remembers seeing her mansion for the first time and “the awed sense I had upon entering — that of an immense place, full of possibilities,” much like her sense of her own life as a child, only to discover that the house, and her existence, “is much, much smaller than its sprawling, many-columned façade would lead one to believe”.

The reviewer is a development consultant, freelance journalist and a director at the School of International Law, Islamabad.

Forty Rooms
(NOVEL)
By Olga Grushin
Marian Wood Books, US
ISBN: 978-0399576874
342pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 20th, 2016