The Bowl Is Already Broken

By Sarah Williams

What do you deem valuable? What would you sacrifice in its cause? These are the questions Mary Kay Zuravleff ’82 asked herself when writing her second novel, The Bowl is Already Broken (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005).

Drawing on Zuravleff’s experience as senior editor of publications at the Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., the novel is set in a fictitious museum located on the capital’s National Mall. The protagonist, Promise Whitaker, is a working mother trying to balance family and her new position as acting director of the Museum of Asian Art, which is peopled with difficult and complex co-workers, including one who is embezzling from the museum to pay for fertility treatments. As if that were not enough, the powers that be are trying to shut down the museum and turn it into a food court, her former boss and mentor has been kidnapped by terrorists while on an archeological dig, and she’s just discovered she’s pregnant with her third child.

The book’s title, inspired by a Zen parable, reveals its meaning in the first chapter. During a presentation full of pomp and circumstance and attended by dignitaries, the museum is presented with an antique Chinese porcelain bowl, which is to be the centerpiece of a new exhibit vital to the museum’s fundraising effort. However, in a scene of seemingly cruel irony, the curator drops the $1.2 million bowl as she carries it up the front stairway of the museum, and it smashes to pieces while the rest of the staff and exhibit visitors look on in horror. Right at the beginning, the bowl is already broken, and the reader begins to learn, along with Promise, the lesson of how to live in a world of impermanence and loss.

Having spent years in museums, Zuravleff has great affection for the quirky environment, the type of individuals that environment attracts, and the world of Asian art. In fact, the book can be read as a sort of love letter to the inner workings of a museum, flaws and all, “where behind the marble walls, museum work can have much in common with mud wrestling.”

One of Zuravleff’s strengths is character development, and she has an uncanny ability to make her characters believable and likeable, even while exhibiting their many—and in some cases, grievous—faults. Putting them on display almost as if they were exhibits in the museum, Zuravleff takes the reader into the psyches of the different characters as she tells the story through their vastly different trials and tribulations. This could present a disjointed overall picture, but Zuravleff skillfully ties it all together with her central theme of value and sacrifice in a world of inevitable change. And just in case the reader has missed the message inherent in the novel’s pages, Zuravleff lays it out in the book’s final line: “Admit there is loss, and all can be treasured.”

Zuravleff currently teaches writing in the MFA program at George Mason University, and she is the author of The Frequency of Souls, which has won several awards. Her short fiction has been published in numerous small magazines, including Gargoyle, and her work is included in the anthology Grace and Gravity. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Gary, and two children, Theo and Eliza.