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The Bowl Is Already Broken: A Novel

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I have a friend who will only allow himself to read one page a night when he's down to the last 15 pages of a really good book. I never could understand this practice before I read "The Bowl Is Already Broken." But, I confess, I couldn't do it. I greedily devoured every word.

Each character revels in and is held prisoner by his or her own obsessions. Even though the characters exist in the microcosm of museum life, this book is such a full story in the world. While revealing the inner workings of a museum, the author also unravels the stories of objects; the meaning expressed in the fabulous decorations of Chinese porcelains as well as their cultural and historical significance. But these descriptions are intertwined with the action, and add significantly to the depth of the characters and the plot. So, when the former director takes off on an archaeological expedition in central Asia, the worlds of art and politics collide. The politics work so well precisely because the author avoids being dull or preachy. This is a clever novel full of beauty and wit.

You'll never look at a museum the same way after enjoying Mary Kay Zuraleff's frisky second novel about "the least-visited museum on the Mall"-the fictitious National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC. The novel opens with pomp and splendor, as dignitaries and international celebs gather at the opening of an exhibit called "All Fired Up!" which is supposed to win the institution much needed-funding via the splashy presentation of a priceless Chinese porcelain bowl to the museum. But, oops!, the little bowl takes a fatal bounce down the entire front stairway, thanks not to some clumsy oaf of a guest, but to the museum's own curator of Chinese ceramics who for some reason decided to pick the thing up. What's an acting museum director to do?

That's one of the challenges facing Promise Whittaker, a tiny, brilliant scholar who looks and sounds like an eighth-grader, but whose common sense has put her in this fix. Promise would much rather be researching her beloved poet Rumi than being responsible for trying to attract enough funding to keep the museum open. Her mentor has suddenly decamped to join a dig in an especially remote desert. Her colleagues are up to all sorts of mischief, and oh, she's pregnant again at 42.

Zuraleff is a former staff member at the Smithsonian, and you get a great idea about what goes on behind the scenes in putting an exhibit together. There is neatly presented information about Rumi and different areas of Asian art. You even find out what to do if you are taken hostage by terrorists, thanks to Promise's husband, who works for Amnesty International.

Yet even with the wealth of characters (my favorite is the curator of ancient Chinese art who is looting her travel fund to pay for fertility treatments), "The Bowl is Already Broken" -like poor Promise-starts to tangle its own feet. The hostage-taking episode, despite that useful escape information, is not really very gripping, and you are left wondering what several of the characters were actually up to.

Nevertheless, Zuraleff's novel is quirky and readable enough to keep you going if you can flutter lightly over some of the stumbles. Where else can you find a compendium of famous museums' worst disasters? And who hasn't wanted to work at a museum? I suspect her first novel is worth checking out, too.

I am a longstanding fan of Mary Kay Zuravleff's writing. I loved her wonderfully inventive first book, The Frequency of Souls, and her current novel also does not disappoint. This is a book to savor and take your time with, for The Bowl Was Already Broken is original, witty, warm-hearted, and also full of the most interesting and amazing information. Zuravleff writes about the art world in a way that is at once curatorial, sensitive, and hysterically funny. Her depiction of family life and happiness will warm your soul. The characters in this novel are like quirky friends, and when I finished the book, I found that I cared about them and felt as if I wanted to know what was going to happen to them beyond the last page. Have you ever felt a bit sad that you were getting close to the end of a book? That's the way I felt about this book--I was sad to finish it--an indication of how much I enjoyed reading The Bowl Was Already Broken.

In the late seventies and early eighties, when I was cutting my teeth on modern and then contemporary literature, I complained frequently to my male friends about the lofty status of male writers like Ernest Hemingway and John Updike. When they write about identity crises and mid-life angst, I complained, their work is viewed widely as pertinent and significant, yet when women write about such things, their work is often diminished with the label "domestic novel" and the suggestion that such subject matter is barely more than soap opera material.

Why the discrepancy - the disconnect in perception of men's and women's lives, male and female writers? Many of my male friends at that time hadn't read many novels by women authors, though I still suspect that they wouldn't consider a novel like Kate Chopin's The Awakening or Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as pulling the weight that say, The Sun Also Rises, might.

While I still don't have the answer to this fundamental question about men's and women's perceptions of literature, I'm happy to report that Mary Kay Zuravleff's The Bowl is Already Broken is a novel that pulls a lot of weight in its presentation of a heroine, Promise Whittaker, whose life is replete with domestic crises on the personal and professional front as well as the realities of international terrorism. It is this complement of the quotidian and world headline fodder that makes the book a satisfying and thought-provoking read.

Promise Whittaker is both a Rumi scholar and a mother and wife. By day she studies Rumi pages at the Museum of Asian Art, a part of the National Institution of Science and Art in Washington, D.C. By night she flings pasta into bowls for her family - husband Leo, a worker for Amnesty International, and two less-than-perfect children, Felix and Lydia. Her home is in shambles, both literally and figuratively; her babysitter is ready to run or to receive the ax, and each time Promise returns to the house, one more thing has structurally fallen apart or come unglued.

When Promise is asked to become acting director of the museum after the former director, her beloved mentor, takes off to dig up history in the Taklamakan Desert, she knows almost immediately that she's in over her head, especially after a variety of strange symptoms and the results from an expired early pregnancy test lead her to believe that she's pregnant with an unexpected child. For this reader, the realism of the "unexpected" is particularly powerful in terms of what it says about the lives of women. Promise is stretched, her short body metaphorically strung on a rack, limbs pulled intensely in opposite directions. She becomes an archetype for all women who are stretched in too many directions as she is forced to juggle the imminent closing of the museum, a prospect that has been kept from her for too long, the startling news that her mentor has been taken hostage, and the idiosyncratic challenges that face any mother with young children.

One of my favorite passages involves an intense day for Promise during which the crowning moment is her conversation with her frantic daughter who calls from school, convinced that she is being attacked by snakes which are gliding under her pants next to her skin. After navigating her child's incoherent sobs, Promise realizes that the seams of her daughter's pants have come unraveled after a recent wash - the threads are fluttering next to her skin like long, wiggly snakes. Mothers and fathers of sensitive children the world over can chuckle knowingly at this passage, which chronicles a trauma that won't make headline news but is certainly the trump of household drama.

Zuravleff's own trump is that she marries these moments with the complexities that we all face in the modern world - terrorism that can snatch away friends and relatives in the night, the bureaucracy one encounters in surviving a nine-to-five work day, the realities of downsizing, the challenge of getting along with other employees and negotiating their traumas and peccadilloes. In addition, Zuravleff tells the story from a wandering minstrel point of view, so that the reader enjoys sailing into the heads of a wide range of characters, from Promise and her husband to her captive boss, to the charming Arthur, another curator and breaker of the bowl referred to in the book's title. The crew is a diverse one, and like the Museum's exquisite cook, the book provides a lovely smorgasbord of the variety that spices up real life, something that we need to be reminded of in our sometimes monochromatic, monotheistic, ethnocentric world.

The Bowl is Already Broken succeeds as a satire of the museum world, certainly, but it also succeeds as a rich novel that chronicles the lives of everyday people who go out and face the world each morning, albeit sometimes pregnant or with snakes in their pants.

Powerful and affecting, this brilliantly crafted novel engages your mind, heart, and soul, effortlessly interweaving domestic drama, ancient philosophy, love story, and call to action.

Exquisite porcelain from China and calligraphies from Japan are displayed in the elegantly marbled galleries of the fictional National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. While to the public crossing the threshold, the museum's hushed spaces convey a reverential and timeless serenity, behind the scenes the staff is in turmoil. A curator has dropped an irreplaceable Chinese porcelain down the museum's grand staircase and the director has resigned. The internal candidate who has been appointed acting director finds she is juggling the vying attentions not only of her friends who are now her staff, but also her family, and her blossoming pregnancy.

Passions, of all sorts, drive the men and women in whose hands are placed the world's artistic heritage. The museum's staff take it as their duty to share their enthusiasm for the art and culture of two-thirds of the world's people. But the powerful symbolism imbued in these cultural masterpieces is not lost on America's political elite either. Contrasting views on the importance of understanding different cultural perspectives are reflected throughout this novel.

A former staff member at the Smithsonian Institution, author Mary Kay Zuravleff delights us with gems of insight into what inspires those who hold custody of the world's greatest art treasures. Her beguiling prose illuminates both the vast arid deserts of Central Asia and the cacophonous world of family life in D.C. with affecting clarity. Part cultural observer, part Sufi mystic, this gifted storyteller has woven a tale for our times.

I just spent a week visiting and touristing in Washington, D.C., and I found reading The Bowl is Already Broken to be an excellent complement to the experience. It's a very good read, very dense, very informative, very true--the climax with the Dalai Lama's speech and and Promise's third baby's arrival brought tears to my eyes. Like the Persian miniature illuminations of Rumi poems that are Promise's area of specialization, the book offers many wonderous, sharp, and vivid details about the Washington world of museum curators and working mothers.

"The Bowl Is Already Broken" is an ambitious book that addresses one of life's big questions: What gives meaning to our daily existence? Many in the Washington workforce believe it is their important contributions to governance, policymaking, or scholarship that drive the nation. Mary Kay Zuravleff seeks to subvert that premise. Her story begins with museum curator Promise Whittaker, who struggles to keep her head above water as a host of unexpected events eddy around her. Once Promise realizes that she can't separate her career from the rest of her messy life, she begins to create some order amid the maelstrom.

In the end she finds that family, friends, and a healthy dose of self-respect have more worth for her than a dream-job or a subjectively valued work of art.

Although the shenanigans that take place at the fictional museum are written in a broad comic style, it takes only a short leap of faith for a museum insider to imagine some of these situations becoming reality.

Ms. Zuravleff has invented a cast of characters who are funny, smart, resilient, and familiar.

I laughed, I cried.... You'll know this book is special upon reading the first sentence: "When the dust settled, there was only dust, and the Chinese bowl rested in pieces at the bottom of the museum steps." The Bowl is Already Broken is rich with wisdom and humor, and is both topical and timeless. It took me to a different world and offered a new perspective on this one. I loved it.

The Bowl Is Already Broken is a witty and warm romp through a fictional museum in our nation's capital. It's a humorous tale of mystery, intrigue, office politics and the ups and downs of the average and not so average American life. Just like a good friend, you'll love these characters because of their quirks and flaws rather than despite them. Once again, Mary Kay Zuravleff has written a novel you hurry home from work to read. You won't want to say goodbye to these characters. Perhaps you can invite them over for dinner sometime soon to see how life is treating them now. A wonderfully good read.

Don't tell anyone, but I took the week off to read this book. Having laughed out loud at Mary Kay Zuravleff's first book THE FREQUENCY OF SOULS, I knew I wouldn't want to miss this one. I wasn't disappointed. Set in Washington, DC, THE BOWL IS ALREADY BROKEN is about how Promise Whittaker, the acting director of the Museum of Asian Art (a veiled reference to the Freer and Sackler museums on the national mall), fights efforts by museum higher ups and politicians to replace the museum with a food court. The story ranges from Promise's family and work life (which you can almost imagine as your own, except MUCH more interesting) to the kidnapping of a colleague while on an archaeological dig in the Taklamakan desert. The book is rich with information about Asian art, fertility treatments, and terrorist techniques. In fact, you can't help being impressed with Zuravleff's obvious knowledge of so many subject areas. But the book is also interspersed with musings on the meaning of life and leavened by Zuravleff's marvelous sense of humor. Aside from enjoying the story line, I found the information about Asian art so interesting that I'm heading down to the Freer and Sackler as soon as I catch up on the work I skipped last week while reading the book! Enjoy!