By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 19, 2005
You've got to love museums to spend nine years writing a book about one. And sure enough, Mary Kay Zuravleff makes her affection blisteringly clear.
On a sunny May morning, the author of "The Bowl Is Already Broken" is conducting a quick-time march through the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, the joined-at-the-hip institutions where she once worked and which she calls "the Museum of Asian Art" in her novel. "Look at that!" she exclaims, gesturing toward a 15th-century Iranian manuscript illustration. "There is a vein in every leaf on every bush under every tree!"
And: "Look at his robe -- is his robe calligraphy?"
And, a minute later: "How do you make a line like that? Can't use a single-hair brush because you can't get the capillary action -- you just get a blob. So you need at least two hairs."
Wonderful stuff, these miniature visions in watercolor, ink and gold. Too bad their days -- at least in Zuravleff's fictional museum complex -- are numbered.
The action of "The Bowl Is Already Broken" centers on a startling decision by bureaucrats in the Castle. (Zuravleff changed the Smithsonian's name but retained that of its distinctive administration building.) They've decided to ship the Asian art collections elsewhere and "reconfigure" the museum as "a food court worthy of our guests." Goodbye, Central Asian miniatures and South Asian statues of Nandi the bull; hello, restaurants named Wok On and trash cans shaped like Fu dogs.
The decision shocks the museum's staff -- even those who'd watched these same bureaucrats in action at the Natural History Museum, "shipping the film collection off-site to make room for more movie theaters and enlarging the gift shop to fill the whole east wing." But what can they do? Asian Art's director throws up his hands and resigns to pursue his own research.
This leaves acting director Promise Whittaker to pick up the pieces. Literally. Not long after Whittaker takes over, one of her curators drops a priceless Chinese porcelain bowl down a marble museum staircase. Hence the book's title, inspired by a Zen parable about how to live in a world of impermanence and loss: Even as one drinks from a favorite glass, one must understand that "the glass is already broken."
Hmmm.
Should we think of the Smithsonian itself as already broken? Has Zuravleff sketched a portrait of a great cultural institution nearing extinction, one whose old-fashioned values are fated to be smashed like broken porcelain? Stay tuned.
She's something of a work of art herself today, with her hennaed hair, black velvet jacket and bright red, sequined cowboy shirt. (Not an urban affectation, mind you: Zuravleff grew up an Oklahoma girl.) A mother of two, she's remembering an earlier Sackler tour with her 4-year-old. "Because I want to look and she wants to run," she recalls, "I said to her: 'Find three things to show me and I'll find three things to show you.' "
Her daughter rose to the challenge. "I have something for you to admire," she said. "Horses!"
And as Zuravleff turns a corner in an exhibition on Asian games, here they are again: earthenware ponies from China's Tang dynasty, playing polo. "Twelve hundred years ago somebody made this, and it's still here," she says, marveling at the thought.
Zuravleff was supposed to be an engineer, like her father and brother. "My Russian peasant people do not choose writing as a profession," she says. But after majoring in mathematics and English at Houston's Rice University, she rebelled, enrolling in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins.
Moving to Washington in 1982, she strung together a series of jobs, finally landing at the publications office of the Sackler and Freer (which share a staff) in 1988. Meanwhile, she was working on a novel whose main characters were engineers. After she published the book, "The Frequency of Souls," in 1996, she left the museum to write and parent from her Northwest Washington home -- and to explore even more familiar territory.
This made her museum colleagues a tiny bit nervous. "When she started writing," says chief curator Massumeh Farhad, "I thought, 'Oh my God, I wonder who she's portrayed.' "
No one in "The Bowl Is Already Broken" is real. Farhad, who thinks Zuravleff showed "uncanny" skill in her evocation of the museum world, says she sometimes found herself thinking "that's so-and-so!" as she read. But she was reacting to details, not whole characters. The people in the novel are at most composites, not real individuals, Farhad says.
The closest thing to an exception would be Zuravleff's and Farhad's old boss, Milo Beach.
"Promise me you're not writing about a museum," Zuravleff recalls the then-director of the Freer and Sackler saying when she told him she was leaving. "Oh, Mary Kay, Mary Kay," he said when she confessed. Later, after she'd created a museum director whose scholarship, like Beach's, focuses on the art of India's Mughal dynasty, she got nervous herself:
"Tell me you're not from Washington state," she pleaded.
He's not. Nor has he been kidnapped by terrorists in the course of his fieldwork. Still, Zuravleff's respect and affection shine through her portrait of R. Joseph Lattimore. Of this Beach-like character, she writes: "A brain, a heart, courage, and a good eye -- these were rare qualities to find in a single museum director."
"Did you see the article he wrote when he left?" she asks now.
Beach resigned as Freer-Sackler director in October 2001 and, a few months later, let loose a blast at his former boss, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small. Writing in The Washington Post, he charged that "the present administration of the institution views the life of the mind with astonishing indifference." Comic novel though it is, Zuravleff's book makes it perfectly obvious that she shares Beach's concern about museum officials who think fundraising first and content second.
"What Milo was saying," she explains, is that "there is a value to things that aren't corporate-linked." For example: The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have made exhibitions with Islamic themes a tough sell to potential corporate sponsors, though the need for Americans to understand the Islamic world has never been greater. (It's worth noting, too, that the pressure on Zuravleff's fictional museum isn't purely financial. Its bosses don't care for the idea that a museum of Asian art is the first thing visitors see from the Metro escalator on the Mall.)
As Zuravleff points out, however, she left the museum four years before Small arrived. What's more, the Smithsonian certainly does face financial challenges. "Somebody said: 'You didn't write a diatribe,' " she recalls. "I said, 'No, I wrote a cautionary tale.' "
Besides: It's not just a book about a museum.
"I start my novels with a question," Zuravleff says, "and the question that starts this book is: What is valuable to you? And: What would you sacrifice to preserve that which is valuable?"
Plenty of relevance there for someone in charge of a museum. But the questions are equally central to the lives of everyone in Zuravleff's cast -- especially Promise Whittaker, dedicated scholar, amateur juggler and hard-working mom.
Former Freer curator Linda Merrill particularly likes the way Zuravleff conveys Whittaker's deep love for her research while showing how she must instantly abandon her professional universe when a call from the school nurse comes through. The lives of working mothers, Merrill says -- in a brief phone interview, with a 2-year-old loudly demanding attention in the background -- are rarely so well evoked in fiction.
With two children and a curator's job, Whittaker's life is full. "Simply put, she wanted what she had but no more," Zuravleff writes. No such luck. On the same plot-thickening day, she learns that she's pregnant with a third child and is asked to guide her museum through the biggest crisis it has ever faced.
Commendably, her husband rolls up his sleeves to help. Unsurprisingly, he's stunned by the amount of work on the Mother Planet.
Returning briefly to the question of the real and the fictional: No, Zuravleff's husband doesn't smoke dope, and no, no, no, he doesn't wear socks with sandals. But when he got to the part in his wife's manuscript where Whittaker observes that the family dishwasher "looked as if it had been loaded by a blind person with a backhoe," he did write, "Aren't you getting a little personal?" in the margin.
Back on the museum tour, Zuravleff is talking about how much she had to learn just to write her book.
"I don't think I knew this existed before I worked at the Sackler," she says, gesturing at a miniature painting that offers a "personal and informal glimpse of the harem of Sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqara." There are blossoming trees, swaying dancers, a parapet with calligraphy streaming across it. "The level of decoration on every surface: It just doesn't stop!" she says. "I mean, you could just get cross-eyed looking at that."
She doesn't, though. She tears herself away. On she goes, through the underground passage between the Sackler and the Freer, up the grand rear staircase that she relocated for dramatic purposes in her book, past the Buddhas, the hanging scrolls, the giant wooden Japanese temple guards and back outside to the sunshine of the Mall.
The Castle looms nearby. The two museums are almost in its shadow.
Perhaps you should visit them, dear reader -- as Zuravleff urges in her nonfiction acknowledgments section -- "while you have the chance."