“Only Orange”
by Camille Bordas
from the December 23, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
Camille Bordas is quickly becoming a regular voice in The New Yorker fiction. Her first piece was published in January 2017, followed by another in 2018. This year she’s had two. So far, I think we have only one of her novels in English, her English-language debut (yes, she is one of those extremely talented authors who is now writing in English despite it not being her first language) How to Behave in a Crowd, which came out in 2017. She has written two prior novels, Les treize desserts (2009) and Partie commune (2011), but I don’t see where those have been translated into English. Perhaps her recently work in English will lead to that happening soon.
“Only Orange” is narrated by a woman named Jeanne. I like its start:
All I said was that she must like beige a lot. I was trying to put my finger on why I disliked her so much.
Jeanne is talking about Audrey, her brother’s girlfriend of about a year. As it turns out, to everyone’s surprise, Audrey is color blind and doesn’t know she’s wearing so much beige. Jeanne is skeptical, and we see that she is not the kind of person to accept anything at face value.
“Only Orange” takes place on a holiday in Spain. Jeanne, her parents, her brother Lino, and Audrey are trying to make this whole family thing work. Jeanne does seem to love her family, but there’s a block in there. It might look like resentment, but to me it is almost disillusionment. She thought things would be better. They’re not, and as insightful and skeptical and intelligent as she is, she hasn’t dealt with that. When Jeanne finds out Audrey is adopted she is envious:
To be able to look at the people who love you the most and not have to worry that you’ll turn out exactly like them must be amazing, I thought. An endlessly renewable source of relief.
This leads to a fascinating, cynical look at Audrey from Jeanne’s perspective: always able to be a victim (“Even when Audrey was in her eighties, it would be one of the first things people said about her: ‘She didn’t have it easy. She was an orphan.'”).
Jeanne is pretty hard to sit with, but Bordas has also imbued her with something I can sympathize with. She’s pretty lost. She wants something, and she doesn’t seem to know what it is. She sees it in her family relationships, and she knows none of them have really done anything wrong, but it’s one of the reasons she’s got a blunt edge (another being that she is having nicotine withdrawals). Bordas portrays this with insightful passages like this:
Because my parents were both teachers (history for him, French for her), I’d grown up under the impression that people matured only in order to teach what they’d been best at in school to the next generation, and so on and so forth until the species died off. (I teach algebra.) But Lino deciding to pursue a career in doing instead of teaching, encountering success in the doing—that had opened a gate to possibilities I hadn’t been aware of. I had no talent whatsoever and couldn’t have taken advantage of the gate if I’d wanted to, but still. I felt like an idiot for not having seen it.
I really liked this story. It’s got a classic “holiday with troubles” vibe, and Bordas’s Jeanne is very well done. Like Jeanne, it doesn’t resolve in any particularly satisfying way, but it is a nice portrait.
I’m looking forward to what you all think. By the way, it ends at Christmas, so perhaps it can be partially festive for that reason!
Listening to Bordas read the story, Jeanne has even more of an edge. It felt like being at the receiving end of one of those one-sided conversations where someone keep explaining all their prooooblems (yes, drawn out just like that) and you are nodding and emoting but inside you are thinking, “maybe there’s another little problem here?”). Finely drawn character, and hard to empathize with, yet very recognizable. A plus, also, for having characters in 2019 who actually live the way people in 2019 live: they look things up on the Internet and browse and then sometimes their browsing results in a purchase that has consequences. The daughter’s role in the story not really central, seemed to me, and could easily have been edited out. Basically was only underscoring how these family dynamics keep getting replayed and reinvented, because that is what families do.
I enjoyed the wit behind some of the writing, as well as the way the writer conveyed the family dynamics as seen by the narrator. Reading the story didn’t feel like time wasted.
But the basic premise of someone only finding out they are colorblind in their mid-twenties was just too implausible for me to buy into, which worked against some otherwise admirable qualities in the writing.
The narrator’s general unhappiness with life was troubling to me. I’m not sure if there was a point to it, other than a kind of cautionary “don’t be like this if you can help it” sort of warning. But then, the story is art, which can be its own excuse for existence – no point is required.
I loved the story, so much so that I googled Camille Bordas and ended up here, as well as downloading her book and finding her short story, “The State of Nature,” which I had read last year and couldn’t remember the name or author of, but had thought about from time to time because of how good it was.
I liked Jeanne immediately. She’s suffered a lifetime of deception: being told that her brother would come out of the womb with a present for her (“for a whole year, I expected random toys to fall out of my mother’s vagina”) to the warning that if she swallowed chewing gum it would make bubbles in her stomach and she would explode. Her parents led her to believe (and she went along with it) that being a teacher was her only option, then betrayed her by supporting her brother’s artistic career. No wonder she has mixed feelings toward her family: they’ve tricked her again and again.
Now comes Audrey, whose colorblindness is obviously feigned — that becomes clear by the end of the story — but her whole family falls for it hook, line and sinker. Yes, she’s angry, and jealous.
And yet she loves them. It’s easy to see that her apparent contempt (“I waved at them, and they took it as encouragement to sit with me”) is a defense against their subtle rejection. Her envy of Audrey’s orphanhood looks like a rejection of her family, but actually reflects her wish to be special; as special as Audrey.
Her daughter Marion is everything she isn’t: direct, demanding, confident. She’s taken Jeanne’s irritation and multiplied it by a factor of ten. Her having a father who’s special hasn’t worked out well for either of them. Jeanne resents him, Marion rejects him outright. And what does Marion get for her naked anger at Jeanne’s father? A grandfather who takes the time to improve his chess game so he can rise to her level; while Jeanne is resigned to constant headaches and absenting herself from the family portrait.
The story poses a question: is self-awareness all it’s cracked up to be? Jeanne is by far the most self-aware member of her family, and also the saddest. And for some of us, the most relatable.
“The narrator’s general unhappiness with life was troubling to me. I’m not sure if there was a point to it, other than a kind of cautionary “don’t be like this if you can help it” sort of warning. But then, the story is art, which can be its own excuse for existence – no point is required.”
I agree with the first sentences, but not the last. Art must entertain both the mind and the emotions. Otr perhaps that is inherent in the definition of art, in which ase this story is not art.
This is one of those stories thaqt makes me think, “Is that the best writing they had to publish this week?”
I found both West’s and mehbe’s perspective on Jeanne interesting, because they are different than mine. I saw Jeanne as this person with self-esteem issues who projected her negative feelings about herself onto others. She has a nice life, with family that loves her and that goes together on vacation to southern Spain. What a life! She quibbles about minor things because she has her own unresolved angst that’s building up inside of her.
To mehbe’s question of what is the point? I think that Camille Bordas is saying here are some silly things that people get frustrated about, and if I make them seem absurd (yet realistic), you may reflect on your own anxiety and absurd reaction to things. It might make us better people at the end of it.
I’m surprised that C.K. West sympathized with Jeanne and thought her reactions to be reasonable. I personally thought her actions were ridiculous and unfounded! I like how the story could spawn two interpretations that are so different.
I greatly enjoyed the story, and find it amazing that a French writer can also write so well in English. Although the story-line is simple, it maintains a decent level of suspense from the Color Blind Glasses affair and makes the characters really shine.
I too loved the story, although I was surprised to find that Jeanne was in her thirties and not much younger as I had originally surmised from some of her petulance. Since I have decided to teach the story, I’d love to know the specific evidence C.K. West finds that Audrey’s colorblindness is “obviously feigned.”
Jeanne is hard to like- cynical, suspicious to the point of paranoia, inclined to hold others in contempt, and rather lacking in empathy. And yet, she’s human, and one can find sympathy for her- her husband’s been unfaithful. She’s trying to quit smoking. She’s clearly the outsider in her family circle, the one who doesn’t fit. She has to collect her daughter from camp for violent behavior. She’s unhappy, and odds are she’ll probably stay that way. It’s a pretty unflinching approach to the character.