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When
I was about 12 years old, I realized that my life was not
exactly novel-worthy. All the books I read focused on extraordinary
people, ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, or
ordinary people at least facing some sort of crisis. Never
mind fantasy and adventure stories—my life didn't even
have any drama. There were no fights in my household, no one
I knew had died, and I didn't even have any falling outs with
friends. I never saw my ordinary life reflected in what I
read.
 Was
the truly mundane, everyday world where we spend the vast
majority of our time unworthy of being captured in writing?
Or was its subtle beauty too elusive, like some exotic flower
that, as soon as it's plucked, droops and fades before one's
eyes into a sad, wilted little weed? Though I've read hundreds
of books since I was 12, it took me nearly ten years to find
a modern realist who captured the most pedestrian of lives:
Barbara Pym.
Pym,
a British novelist who was active from the 1950s to her death
in 1980, may need an introduction. Though she has a substantial
body of work and her domestic, character-focused novels have
garnered her apt comparisons to Jane Austen, she is hardly
a household name and nearly fell into obscurity in her lifetime.
After finding some success in the 1950s and early '60s, she
suddenly became unable to find a publisher until nearly the
end of her life, when in 1977 the Times Literary Supplement
nominated her "the most underrated novelist of the century."
The remainder of her works were published in the following
years, and Quartet in Autumn, a more somber work that
meditates on death, loneliness, and office work, was nominated
for the Booker Prize. Most of her books remain in print, but
nevertheless she has remained under the radar.
Barbara
Pym has been called "the chronicler of quiet lives," and indeed
this is her singular charm. She writes about unimportant people
going about their everyday business, not even writing about
notable periods in their lives. There are no great dramas
in a Pym novel—only small, sometimes nearly imperceptible
dramas. Occasionally there will be death, or someone will
fall in love, but even these events, which are the entire
crux of many other novels, are simply part of the quiet everyday
fabric of life in a Pym novel.
 Everyday
people are at the heart of her work not because they do anything
in particular, but simply because they are people,
and therefore inherently interesting and valuable. Her cast
of characters usually includes, with varying degrees of overlap,
church ladies, spinsters, clergymen, anthropologists, and
college students. The stories focus on the minutia of their
lives as they organize jumble sales, write, keep house, meddle
in the business of other people, make fusses about guests,
visit, and have endless cups of tea.
Though
her novels are gently comedic, they are tinged with bittersweet
moments. Pym started writing in a period when England was
recovering from the devastation of World War II. It was a
period of uncertainty following a period of chaos that had
upheaved much of the British social order. Vast numbers of
young men were dead, leaving a disproportionate number of
women. London, where many of Pym's novels are set, had been
horrifically bombed. And yet she only occasionally alluded
to the war in her stories: rationing is mentioned, a building
in the neighborhood is being rebuilt, a lost friend is discussed.
Instead, Pym largely focuses on routine and minutia.
Perhaps
it was the horror of the war that made these subjects so valuable
to her. Readers get the sense that she and her characters
are trying to reestablish a sense of normalcy for which routine
and convention are essential; the making of tea, which is
a regular and frequent occurrence in her stories, takes on
a nearly sacred significance, at which she pokes some fun
but still treats with respect. There is a moment in Excellent
Women when the narrator asks her friend, who is preparing
yet another pot of tea, if they really need tea. This question
flummoxes her friend, and she quickly takes back her question,
commenting, "I began to realize that my question had struck
at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question
that starts a landslide in the mind." It's a funny moment,
but also bittersweet as one wonders what thoughts, exactly,
the questioning of convention might unloose. Civilization
had very nearly fallen apart in the previous decade, and the
veneer of normalcy, though slightly ridiculous, is also essential
to these characters.
 Even
when she pokes fun at them, Barbara Pym handles her subjects
tenderly, writing in Less Than Angels, "Life itself
[is] sometimes too strong and raw and must be made palatable
by fancy, as tough meat may be tender by mincing." Her deep
affection for these utterly normal people is so heartfelt
that one can't help but see the value, the importance of their
lives, and by extension the value of all quiet lives, which
we most of us live.
It is
difficult to begin recommending a particular Pym novel, because,
like life, they all run together a bit and can be difficult
to differentiate. However, Excellent Women is perhaps
the most representative of her novels, with an unmarried church-going
busybody at its center, who occupies herself with the tiny
details of church and the lives of her vicar and neighbors.
The novel, written early in her career but late enough for
Pym to have established her definitive style, introduces the
full range of her characters.
A
Few Green Leaves, one of the novels written during the
period when she didn't think she'd be published again, covers
similar territory as Excellent Women, but with a somewhat
more meditative bent. Set in a small English countryside town
in the 1970s, the provincial feeling of Pym's novels (many
of which are set in London) comes into its own. Pym weaves
together the lives of the old and the young, the urban and
the rural into a portrait of quiet change and the creep of
modernity into even the most rustic places.
Quartet
in Autumn is her most serious and touching work. Centered
on four aging office workers doing unspecified menial jobs,
the book follows each of them through a few months of their
lives, which are in turn banal, strange, lonely, and content.
The balance that Pym strikes indeed achieves the sense of
the eponymous quartet.
In an
era where competition for our attention is getting ever fiercer
and flashier, when the sheer volume of information, entertainment,
and choices that are available to us can be overwhelming,
it can be a bit of a shock to stumble across something as
arrestingly quiet and unassuming as the novels of Barbara
Pym. These books are a respite, a space where readers can
take a moment to reconnect with the quiet moments that, even
though we sometimes forget about them, make up most of everyday
life.
(May,
2008)
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