When I people-watch, I don’t care much for evaluating someone’s physical appearance. Instead I try to figure out what they are thinking and feeling at that moment I’ve caught them in. That couple in line ordering breakfast at the Carnegie Mellon University café kissed for the first time last night, I decide. They have none of the casualness born of the reassurance of long-term intimacy and all of the enthusiasm for an exciting new experience.
I watch her press herself up to him. In response he straightens up to give himself another inch or so before he says “We’d like pancakes, please,” to the cashier. The girl wonders if she looks good enough for him. With the hand not holding his, she primps in a way frantic enough to suggest it’s driven by concern about her merits, not by normal nerves the first daylight after the first kiss brings. She settles her shirt hem over the waistband of her jeans just so—now her stomach looks its flattest—and pulls her hair forward like that, perfect. I can see what she can’t. This is silly fussing: he’s just thrilled with himself. He walks her to the silverware bar, hand on the small of her back, looking around the café for (male) friends to give a pleased good morning nod to. She dismisses him to find a table; he lurches away from her in his haste to do this right. He stands over one: This one? She—the princess of breakfast—shakes her head. Chin up, she picks a table next to the window. He scoots after her. Seated now, she rearranges herself to perfection; he scans the room for friends he might have missed. He holds both her hands. Pancakes arrive. The first breakfast in this new world begins.
I sit at a table near this couple, holding Jane Austen’s Emma open to the last page. Reading Emma is people-watching the way I like to do it, and in the company of a very talented guide. Here, Austen says, we have a gentlemen who is stymied by the sort of ordinary occurrences most of us just go with. Let’s see what he does when it snows a little more than he expected it to. Now this next woman fears herself inferior to all she encounters. Listen to her tell everyone that her brother-in-law has two carriages, not one. And now, here we have the girl who plagues herself and others with her conviction that she knows best in every circumstance. And there’s her friend who suffers as a result. They are going to sort out who should marry whom: let’s watch.
My only complaint about people-watching is that nothing extraordinary happens: I’ve never gotten to sit on a bench across from an Edison at the moment he turned on a light bulb for the very first time. Everyone I’ve watched is merely going about the business of being people as mundanely as it can be done.
And so too it was with Emma. The story was a delightful afternoon of people watching at its best. For me, it added up to nothing more significant.
Emma: 2.5 stars: indulged as well as any author has, my curiosity about people. But neither impresed me at any one point with anything it offered nor added up to anything in total.
Recommended by: my friend Fiona. It’s one of her favorites; she wasn’t sure if it was a good book for me. I read it because she convinced me to take recommendations that are not generated specifically by my chase for my ideal book. She fears I’ll miss many books that I couldn’t have guessed I’d love if I become too narrowly focused on finding my ideal.
