Because we all make questionable decisions from time to time, it’s only natural to wonder if we are our own worst enemy, or if we are the hero in our life, or something in between. Many memoirs begin with this question. However, this book is not a memoir: it’s a … Read More
Tag: a favorite novelist
“Fiction . . . is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web . . .”
Virginia Woolf continues, “attached ever so lightly, perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves.” It’s only when the web is torn in the middle, says Woolf, that we see that … Read More
“For what could be more peculiar than a crowd of grown-up people . . . discussing scholarly niceties that meant nothing to most of the world?”
One of the things that I love about Barbara Pym’s novels is that her characters never set out to impress anyone. They acknowledge that their choices – for example, attending an academic conference as treatment for a broken heart – are eccentric. They’re vulnerable, interesting, and sometimes fooled by … Read More
“Thorny people. They don’t always follow the etiquette.”
What do you think a story about a thorny family would include? If it’s by Anne Tyler, and if it covers a period of sixty years, you can expect to see that things don’t always work out. For example, the central character, named Mercy, does not have a close relationship … Read More
“When his wife had been alive, he had hardly noticed Jessie Morrow; indeed, if possible, he had noticed her even less than he had noticed his wife.”
In a 1978 BBC radio program, Barbara Pym said, “Perhaps I’ve been influenced by something I was once told about Proust – that he was said to go over all his characters and make them worse.” I laughed when I heard this because Pym does have a way of … Read More
“Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women . . .nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.”
When I read about “the unexpected joy of repeat experiences” during difficult times, I immediately thought of the pleasure I have in rereading novels by Barbara Pym. Surely one of the ways we can cope with the stress of an international pandemic is to seek out the company of … Read More
“The waitress seemed to sense that this was not the moment to ask if they had everything they needed.”
Of course, the waitress was right: these people clearly didn’t have everything they needed. This is familiar territory for fans of Anne Tyler. We count on seeing an “eccentric ecosystem of relatives and neighbors” who aren’t getting the assurances, stability or respect they need. When the New York Times… Read More