I’m not sure why writer Penelope Lively has not achieved in the U.S. the recognition, nor broad readership, she has in Britain. She’s stylized and pensive, a social realist, my kind of writer, concerned largely, in a plethora of novels and a trilogy of memoir having to do with her roots in Egypt, all anchored by personal timelines and interior narratives defining past and present.
Many, perhaps most of her primary characters, are aging, or aged, and that too is a rarity in fiction, and all the more relevant as a generation of elders keeps on keeping on. [Lively in 91 now.] And, often, a country or city house in that distinctive English tradition, named and flowering, or foreboding.
It is June the 15th. Mid-year, mid-week, mid-morning. World’s End sits amid a landscape of exuberance. The verge alongside the track is lush, brimming with red campion, knapweed, foaming drifts of cow parsley. The hedges are studded with creamy plates of elder. There is a feeling of completion – that the surging growth of May has peaked, is suspended now in its abundance. Only the wheat is still growing. The green pelts have become deep seas that billow in the wind.
I was a huge fan of her memoirs, particularly the Booker Prize winner, MOON TIGER and novels like THE PHOTOGRAPH and CITY OF THE MIND, and finally read HEAT WAVE [1996.] In this thoughtful eloquent novel, Lively displays, in fact, perfects, the juxtaposition of generations, as well as the intricacies of loving relationships. Her protagonists are often historians, architects, artists, in this case, writers and editors, who serve as witness and scribe. The plot is skimpy, the setting sophisticated, and the insights, profound. That’s Penelope Lively.
Throughout a hot summer at a country estate where Pauline and her daughter’s family live in adjacent cottages, passions flair, suspicion and the echo of betrayal hover like the heat, dinner table dialogues reveal character. A novel in which you linger like a lazy summer afternoon.
Teresa has long since come to terms with her father’s defection, but she remains fatally endowed with expectations for the best. Being herself without malevolence, deviousness or duplicity she expects others to behave as she would and perplexed rather than enlightened when they do not. She has never been attuned to the treachery of circumstances. When the rocks loom she does not recognize them.
This is, however, Pauline’s story. Her history on repeat. Will she finally making peace with her past or is she rekindling her disappointment? Can she protect her daughter from the same scenario, despite a different time, different temperaments, different proclivities. Or not. Do personal histories repeat?
Pauline realizes she is an expert, a connoisseur. She has a subject, the special subject on which she is the leading authority. She is the authority on jealousy. She could write a treatise on jealousy, a disquisition, a learned paper with footnotes and appendices. She could give seminars on jealousy, she could run a symposium, she could devise a degree course on the evolution and manifestations of jealousy.
The ending, abrupt and brief, is surprisingly satisfying. What I like best in this novel is the way Lively shifts tense to paint scenes that feel present. Pauline observes and narrates her daughter’s strained marriage, and her novice parenting, reflecting on herself in a similar predicament ages ago, but even as she shifts to reveal the past, she stays present, keeping us with her as voyeur rather than at arm’s length or in the minds’ eye.
Lively might be the progenitor of contemplative writers like Tessa Hadley and Zadie Smith, also Alice McDermott, another favorite.
Stay tuned for more backlist gems. Happy reading.