When I finished reading Mary Beard's SPQR, which was on my iPad Kindle app, I checked my library for something lighter and shorter to read as a diversion. I saw that my wife had added Barbara Pym's Jane and Prudence (1953) to our Kindle collection, and I thought it would be a perfect choice as well as a nice trip down memory lane. Although Pym started publishing her fiction not long after the second world war, she experienced a sudden revival in the late seventies when Philip Larkin and David Cecil both named her the most underrated writer of the 20th century. After nearly fifteen years of relative obscurity, suddenly her novels were back in print, and some of her more recent works found a publisher.
J and I first started reading Pym on our second trip to England in the early 1980s while we were spending a few weeks in Oxford and London where I was doing research. These were the perfect locations for reading Pym, whose works are usually set in one or the other of those places. What was perhaps more remarkable, although decades had passed since her earliest novels, the England she described seemed unchanged from what we were observing all around us. I suspect that is no longer the case, but the British are notoriously slow to embrace change, and the differences between the fifties and eighties were not so startling as between then and now.
What I have always found appealing about Barbara Pym's writing is the way she creates a world rich in character and texture. Her attention to the tiny details of daily existence and the many trivial dilemmas that plague her characters soon immerses her readers in her stories, all of which revolve to a greater or lesser extent around the disappointments experienced by women who persist in seeking the company of men. Many reviewers and critics have likened Pym to Jane Austen, and I can understand why, but the comparison is also misleading. Austen's range is broader, yet Pym's novels nevertheless plumb similar depths of character, but with what seems to me an even greater sense of comedy.
Pym is, however, similar to Austen in yielding more insights and reasons for appreciation and understanding to multiple readings. Jane and Prudence was one of the first of her novels that I read, perhaps the very first, and I was quickly converted to a fan of her fiction. But when I returned to the novel after more than thirty years, I was further amazed by how well it holds up. The setting no longer seems nearly contemporary, and in that it is much more like reading something by Austen, but her insights into her characters are timeless. I was particularly struck by the deftness with which Pym handles the point of view of her narration. She moves effortlessly from character to character, sometimes inserting an aside along the way, and yet the reader never seems to lose track of the narrative thread, or even to be aware of the skillful weaving of the narrative. This technique only heightens the irony which is so much a part of Pym's style and underscores the gaping distances between the perceptions of her characters who, of course, remain blissfully unaware of their ignorance and misunderstandings.
The other attraction of Barbara Pym, apart from the entertainment of reading such a masterful writer and storyteller, is the reassurance one feels in discovering her profound insights into the English character and, more broadly, human nature in general. Also, as with the novels of Jane Austen, Pym's novels are timeless in their depiction of human sexual attraction and the comedy of human psychology. I will most likely re-read more of her novels now that I've rediscovered her. Perhaps she will be my Anne Tyler for the rest of this year. But first I shall pursue another diversion into the much more problematic world of Paul Bowles, more of which anon.
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