A Novel That Refuses to Leave the Kitchen

The Pantry Hours begins with a woman opening a cupboard and ends, three hundred and twelve pages later, with the same woman closing it. In between, Clémence Aury's novel does not leave the kitchen once. Not for a scene, not for a paragraph. Everything we learn about the narrator's life, her marriage, her grown children, her dead mother, the house she is about to sell, we learn from what happens at the table, the stove and the sink over the course of a single year.

It sounds like a constraint, and it is one. But after about thirty pages I stopped noticing it, and after a hundred I began to feel that it was the only honest way to tell this story. Most of the important conversations in most families happen in the kitchen. Aury has simply refused to pretend otherwise.

The narrator, who is never named, is a retired schoolteacher in her sixties living in a large, cold house in a provincial town. Her husband has recently moved into the spare room. Her daughter visits on Sundays and her son telephones on the first of every month. The house is too big and too expensive, and the novel's slow, almost invisible plot is the process by which she decides to sell it, told entirely through the objects and meals that pass through the room where she spends most of her day.

Aury is extraordinary on objects. There is a chapter, eleven pages long, about a jar of quince jelly made by the narrator's mother twenty years earlier, which nobody has ever opened because nobody wants to be the one to finish it. There is a scene in which the husband and wife divide the cutlery, fork by fork, without once mentioning that they are dividing it. There is a set piece at Christmas in which the whole family cooks together and nobody says anything true for six pages, and it is the most painful thing in the book.

The translation by Tobias Wren is careful and unshowy, which is what this book needs. Aury's sentences are long and domestic, full of lists and small corrections, and Wren has found an English that moves at the same pace without sounding translated. I noticed only one place where I felt the original pressing through, a passage about the names of kitchen utensils that clearly depends on French words having genders, and he handles it with a short, graceful footnote rather than pretending the problem is not there.

Not every reader will have the patience for this book. It is slow, and it is meant to be. If you want a novel in which things happen to people in many places, this is not it. But if you have ever sat at a kitchen table late at night while someone you love washed up without speaking, and understood that the washing up was the conversation, The Pantry Hours will feel less like a novel than like a room you have been in.

I read it over three weeks in August, a chapter at a time, at my own kitchen table. I do not think I will read it anywhere else.