The Adventure of the Ordinary

Last night I found myself still thinking about James Wood’s review of Geoff Dyer’s new memoir Homework, in this week’s New Yorker. Wood praises it for, among other things, its detailed descriptions of a working-class English childhood. He writes, “Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing.” Wood has a taste for writing that makes ordinariness vivid. “The adventure of the ordinary” – that’s what he called it in his great review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I went back and looked that piece up. Wood writes,

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Ajax. [“Total Recall," The New Yorker, August 13 & 20, 2012]

That passage is one of my touchstones. Wood values it, too. He used it again in his brilliant “Serious Noticing,” the title piece in his 2019 collection.