What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [64]
Anyone can drop a smell cliché into a story, yet only a few authors bring a true olfactory sensibility to their work. In a letter to The Nation in 1914, the English professor Helen McAfee mourned the fact that the smells in contemporary American fiction were all clichés: “For example: the complementary smell of a New England spinster story, lavender; of a tale of camp life, pines; of a June romance, roses.” She praised Russian authors like Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, whose smells “are keen and fresh…not dragged in simply for form’s sake.” When smell is used in this way, she wrote, “the impression on the reader is correspondingly deep.” Inspired by Professor McAfee, let’s take an unapologetically nasocentric point of view and ask, Who are the writers that bring an olfactory dimension to their work, and how do they make it succeed?
“This all started on a Saturday morning in May, one of those warm spring days that smell like clean linen.” So begins Anne Tyler’s novel Ladder of Years, about a woman who walks away from her family during a beach vacation in Maryland and starts a new life of anonymous domesticity. Tyler plays on the theme of interchangeability—of people, places, and entire lives—and supports it with deliberately generic odors. A doctor’s office smells like a “mixture of floor wax and isopropyl alcohol,” a town library exudes “a smell of aged paper and glue,” and so on. The heroine notes these familiar odors, but they don’t touch her emotionally.
The smell of freshly baked bread drifts through Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City amid constant references to snorting coke and its nasal complications. The story begins with the protagonist’s reminiscence of waking up to the smell of an Italian bakery in Manhattan’s West Village, in an apartment he shared with an old girlfriend, now his ex-wife. The scent turns up in a passage about his mother at home, and again when his sympathetic coworker Megan buys him a loaf to see him through a coke-fueled downward spiral. At the burned-out end of a nonstop weekend of partying, he trades his Ray-Bans to a bakery deliveryman who tosses him a bag of hard rolls. The aroma returns in the book’s famous last lines: “You get down on your knees and tear open the bag. The smell of warm dough envelops you. The first bite sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.” (Skeptical readers might object: Wouldn’t heavy use of Bolivian marching powder have devastated the hero’s sense of smell? After all, long-term snorting results in sniffling, nasal crusting, ulceration, bleeding, postnasal drainage, and, most spectacularly, a perforated septum. The only study of smell in cocaine abusers found that ten of eleven had a normal sense of smell; even the patient with a perforated septum could smell just fine.)
ONE AMERICAN WRITER, Nathaniel Hawthorne, embodied all three traits of olfactive genius. His novel The House of the Seven Gables is filled with smells. Here is the New England village feast celebrating the completion of the house: “The chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen-smoke, impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The mere smell of such festivity, making its way into everybody’s nostrils, was at once an invitation and an appetite.” Clearly, Hawthorne was a man who liked to eat.
In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne describes the Inspector of the Custom-House, a man who was the son of a Revolutionary War colonel. The Inspector was remarkable for “his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of