Past and present mingle between the covers of 13 preservation tales.

BY ANNE MATTHEWS

Armchair critics like to claim that all fiction has only two plots: Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. But maybe there’s a third choice, the preservation tale, where saving an imperiled building or landscape transforms a character’s life. Preservation lit should not be confused with such genre standbys as Girl Gets House (think Rebecca, think Jane Eyre) or Boy Gets House, House Gets Nasty (think Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” or even Stephen King’s The Shining). Preservation tales, in fiction and nonfiction, whether in the form of novel, memoir, or children’s book, are almost always battle dispatches, from many times and many fronts; they only look gentle. Consider this baker’s dozen, nearly all with happy endings.

Four Infrastructure Tales and Three Fantasias

A preservationist rereading can add fizz to familiar classics. Suddenly, Moby-Dick becomes an ecofable, Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables a story of how a restoration lifts a curse, Cather’s The Professor’s House a celebration of the saving of Mesa Verde. And in the post-WWII years, as the preservation and environmental movements grew, so did preservation’s presence in fiction.

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Invisible Cities (1974)
By Italo Calvino
When Kublai Khan asks Marco Polo to speak of his native Venice, the explorer instead describes 55 urban marvels seen on his travels, each preserved only in the telling: a spider-web city, a moon city, a city of living tombs, a city of bathtubs and naiads, a city where illuminated canoes ply a great estuary, even a city that is "set on dry terrain" but still "stands on high pilings," where "the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles … a city a-flutter with ribbons." Invisible Cities has no plot or characters, just settings, every one a Venetian reflection.

A Horseman Riding By (1966)
By R. F. Delderfield
In the tradition of Galsworthy and Dickens, all Delderfield’s fine fat novels of English life teach, preach, and entertain. This leisurely trilogy combines a multi-family saga, a sympathetic portrait of the changes on a country estate from the Boer War to the 1960s, and an ardent plea for architectural and landscape preservation in south Devon, the author’s home region.

Garden State (1973)
By Julian Moynahan
New Jersey suburbanites facing corporate land grabs devise a well-wrought revenge, exposing as they go the perfidies of developers, academics, and politicos. It’s The Cherry Orchard in reverse—and also that literary rarity, a suspenseful nimby narrative. (“The world’s only novel about zoning,” says Frank Popper, professor of urban planning at Rutgers.)

So Far From Heaven (1973)
By Richard Bradford

Bradford wrote two novels set in the American Southwest, the coming-of-age classic Red Sky at Morning and this offbeat picaresque tale that is half lament for the trashing of northern New Mexico ("the sweet cool land of the mountains … the last beautiful place in America") and half cross-cultural romance: Texas oilman meets Hispanic activist and finds redemption through view-shed preservation. A dark, jokey, impassioned land-use novel, fueled by love of place.

 

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Colony (1992)
By Anne Rivers Siddons
Siddons mostly writes slick entertainments, peopled with privileged women who whine amusingly. This book is different: The sudsy plot is overlaid by a nuanced portrait of Maine’s Blue Hill peninsula and its ecology, natural and social, especially the summer retreats of the eastern rich and the locals who tolerate them—that is, until development threatens both tribes. Probably the world’s only septic-access novel. (For a downscale rendering of a similar theme, try Dazzle, a sex-and-shopping epic by Judith Krantz that tracks three superrich sisters as they plan a Seaside-like city—with plenty of retail—for their family’s vast ranch on the southern California coast.)

Marion’s Wall (1973)
By Jack Finney
A young couple renovating a San Francisco apartment find a cryptic message scrawled in lipstick by an earlier tenant, a most willful silent-film actress, in 1926. A story of many kinds of preservation and possession, as well as of the search for a cache of lost silent films, from Lubitsch’s Great Gatsby and Sjostrom’s Divine Woman to all 42 reels of von Stroheim’s Greed. (Finney also wrote the time-travel classic Time and Again, researched with an antiquarian’s care, whose hero moves between the New York of modern times and that of the 1880s.)

 

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The Twenty-Seventh City (1992)
By Jonathan Franzen
This early work by Franzen (author of The Corrections) offers a magical-realist tour of a future St. Louis under siege, in which a scruple-free female police chief from Bombay takes over the town, uglifying the built environment and expanding her river kingdom through decidedly foul means. A paranoid’s guide to urban planning, a preservationist’s nightmare.

Read more from our current issue online, look for the September/October 2002 issue of Preservation on newsstands, or e-mail us to purchase a copy.