It makes a certain brutal sense that in 1963 this spinster (a term Pym embraced) would be sheared away from British culture, along with Harold Macmillan and below-the-knee hemlines. Pym’s novels are filled with the arrivals of new curates, the struggles of “decayed gentlewomen,” the ditherings of clerical and academic wives. Each self-denying single woman, like the heroine of “Some Tame Gazelle,” Pym’s first novel, is deemed “fortunate in needing very little to make her happy,” though the blunt, truthtelling housekeeper generally knows better. Life in Pym’s world is spiced up by the occasional emergence of an exotic or a rogue: the Hungarian businessman in “Civil to Strangers” (written in 1936 and published posthumously), the womanizing widower of “Jane and Prudence” (1953). But there are always altars to be decorated, charitable jumble sales to be organized, improving lectures to be attended. Anyone in 1963 who still wanted fiction set in the vicarage, publishers thought, could go back to Jane Austen, the writer to whom Pym has ceaselessly, and often wrongly, been compared. Her novels may seem to come down, like Austen’s, on the side of sense, but the inner life from which they sprang was a maelstrom of sensibility, a confusion of disproportionate feelings lavished upon badly chosen men.
I am sitting in Massachusetts General Hospital. My sister has just emerged from surgery for a very rare vulvar sarcoma. I’m due to stay overnight as support. A text arrives from my husband informing me he’s just seen the preview for a movie based on the same subject as my novel-in-progress. The movie, Augustine, is a French film about the young hysteric Augustine Gleizes and her relationship with renowned French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. I’d been praying that no one would tell this incredible but little-known story before I did. I immediately enter a tailspin, exacerbated by the bad timing: my sister’s undergone a successful operation, and here I am, having a meltdown. I can’t pull myself out of the spiral: I’m too late—I’ve missed my chance to produce the first work of art about Augustine and Charcot. My debut collection, Hangings: Three Novellas, was published eight years earlier. Why has it taken me so long to complete this novel? I post on Facebook; friends try to calm me; my sister is incredibly gracious; and I feel guilty for requiring comfort rather than giving it.
It will be another nine years until the novel is finished.
Every spring, as days in the north stretch longer and melting snow trickles into streams, drowsy animals ranging from grizzlies to ground squirrels start to rally from hibernation. It’s tempting to say that that they are “waking up,” but hibernation is more complicated and mysterious than a simple long sleep: Any animal that can spend months underground without eating or drinking and still emerge ready to face the world has clearly mastered an amazing trick of biology.
In a Bennett novel, stories aren’t passageways toward a higher plane. Stories are essential; they don’t have to promise salvation to do their work. Living in a book is like living through the years, she says, not a substitute for life but life itself. The wonder of “Checkout 19" is that such a compact novel could accommodate Bennett’s sprawling imagination. Wry, hilarious, melancholic, narcotic, bracing — how can so many contradictory adjectives be true at once?
Ingle spins a yarn which many women can relate to in terms of themselves, their mothers or the grandmothers. In spite of her nationality Ingle stands for traditional Irish motherhood and its enduring power.
In my favorite type of Sedaris essay — the kind I’ll keep rereading — the author takes an unusual or taboo topic, such as death or incontinence, and then shows us how a group of flawed characters including himself circle around that topic; but then, in the last paragraph or two, he unleashes a blast of tenderness or humanity that catches you off guard.
Sitting on the porch of the house
the father doesn’t remember is his own,