On the Spiraling Style

Madeline Beach Carey | 20. de maig 2025

The rocky coastline of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, beneath Eileen Gray's Villa E-1027 and the Cabanon de Le Corbusier. (Photo: Tangopaso, cropped from original at Wikimedia Commons)

Eileen Gray's famous Villa E-1027, a modern masterpiece in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, is the subject of no fewer than three architecture monographs, as well as a graphic novel, a feature-length film, and a novel. The novel is Jane Alison's Villa E, “about two brilliant, complex artists and the extraordinary place that bound them,” and the latest book in Madeline Beach Carey's “Building Novels” series.

I first came across Jane Alison’s work in 2019 when I read her craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. It’s a fascinating, deeply original book about experimental literary strategies. Oftentimes I use passages from that book when teaching fiction workshops. Alison opens the craft book/critical study with a woman and a structure that prove to be one of her most important, and generative, obsessions:

In 1926 an Irish designer named Eileen Gray, who’d created lots of gorgeous, strange furniture but scarcely a house, began designing a shiplike villa on the south coast of France that would drive the famed architect Le Corbusier wild. Corbu had just announced that a house was a “machine to live in,” but Gray thought. No: a house is person’s shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives. To start designing, Gray studied how she and a housekeeper moved throughout the day; she made diagrams of their motions and those of the sun to reveal natural patterns—loops in the kitchen, deep lines by the windows, meanders through the living room—an organic choreography.

Just five years later, Alison uses Eileen Gray’s story in a novel, instead of in a critical study. It’s a brave, somewhat counter intuitive thing to do: publish a book on the craft of writing and then try out your own advice. However, Alison has the style and precision to pull it off. And her obsession with form—with design, the architecture of literature, houses, and emotional lives—echo wonderfully between her fiction and non-fiction.

The facts of Villa E are clear: Eileen Gray, the Irish modernist architect, built E-1027, in the 1920s on the French Riviera. Le Corbusier, a friend of Eileen's former lover, adored the house. So much so that he arranged to live in a cottage next to it and was sometimes credited with its design. Villa E takes place during the final week of Le Corbusier's life:

Le Grand. Despite the huge built world he’s made, it’s to a tiny cabin he goes, with a tamarisk and cactuses and aloes on a narrow earthern terrace above the sea. His true home: the cabonon is his shell, he the squirting thing inside. He’s felt this ever more the past months, everything growing a shade darker each day as he’s retreated into his skull—ever more inward, into the dark, ancient man in a cave.

Passages alternate between the thoughts of Eileen and Le Corbusier, or Le Grand, as Alison calls him. Le Grand works alone in his cabin. Eileen drives along the coast, checking in on her houses. This is a beautiful part of the world: soulful cliffs that lend easily to reflections on aging and desire, loss, regret, the cruel and inevitable passage of time.

Cover of Villa E: A Novel by Jane Alison

Both characters are near the end of their lives. They both think about the past, and here the author highlights the great gulf of difference between men and women in the first half of the last century. Le Grand recalls his life as a famous visionary and his sexual escapades, while Eileen's memories focus on cases of sexism, of ways in which she and her work were belittled or ignored:

Although that yes was the problem. Too generous with others, both of them, each with a parade of women sooner or later, people like that always need others and how humiliating it became when women Damia would skulk about with and the women he started bringing to the house by the sea to entertain the big men but

She tears away a sheet of paper now and stands, brushes off trousers, shakes one leg and the other, and wonders, Is it this place that dredges up all the past?

Villa E celebrates Gray’s design by creating two spiraling narratives. The result is hypnotic and at times quite beautiful. My reservation comes from the kernels of historic truth—hinted at but hidden within the passages. Would the novel be more successful if the characters felt more “invented?” Because the narrative is complex and dreamlike, but based on real lives, the facts of the matter hover above the pages, sometimes making the reader stop and look up the “real” information or images. This takes away from the beautiful spiral Alison has created; a design so organic and innovative suffers when the reader is still grounded in reality. The ghost of the internet invades our reading experience!

The book tells us that, encouraged by her lover, Bado, Eileen built the house she had longed to design. However, because she was not a French citizen, Eileen could not buy the land herself, and had to buy it in Bado's name. That bureaucratic hiccup would be her ultimate downfall. The house is a triumph, but Bado makes it his own, eventually forcing Eileen to move on and design a second home in the hills. Le Grand becomes a frequent visitor to the seaside house, recognizing its genius but insisting upon his influence on it. Violating the purity of the villa, he paints sexual murals on its white interior walls, which, because of his reputation, cannot be removed.

While reading Alison's experimental prose, I thought about what a reinvented story would have been like, an organic and new narrative design: with a different ending, I dare not say happy, but perhaps more promising. If the characters had been slightly more unmoored from the historical figures, the reader would remain focused on the world of the book, without wandering off to look for maps, blueprints, photographs, or some other proof of the real-life events. Still, the novel is delightful and inventive, radical in its nuance and shape, and certainly a must-read for anyone interested in Gray’s legacy and the tragic story of E-1027.