"The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

In The Bookshop (1978) author Penelope Fitzgerald presents the determination shown and the obstacles faced in her English heroine’s path as she moves to coastal Suffolk and opens a humble bookshop. She spices her story with generous doses of wryly observed humor, but beneath it all is England’s ossified class structure, with its nasty  oppressive dealings, small and large. It is a slender volume, full of quirky observations, laugh-out-loud humor, and all of it done with exemplary economy.

Set in 1959, the story of widowed Florence Green’s foray into retail contains the minutely observed challenges she faces in running the town’s only bookshop. She must deal with such vicissitudes as a vicious and implacable local society matriarch, an onsite storage facility with permanently wet floors and walls, and a cranky poltergeist. 

Along the way, Fitzgerald manages the utmost clarity with the stingiest word use. Florence meets Milo, the slouching, somewhat glamorous BBC employee, whom she captures as going “through life with singularly little effort.” The evil society matriarch has a nephew in Parliament (who facilitates her aunt’s scheming); Fitzgerald sums him up as “brilliant, successful, and stupid.” We learn from David Nicholls’s 2013 introduction that the protagonist shares liberal political views with the author, in that she divides the world into “exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given time, predominating.” 

The author allows us a peek into the internal dialogue of a charming, ambitious, and kindly heroine. Unfortunately she must contend with English village tastes (provincial), rural characters (quirky and plainspoken), and mores (circumscribed). Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize for her novel Offshore. Clearly, this was a novelist who knew her craft, and plied it with world class skill. The Bookshop is unblinking, economical, charming, and brilliant. Set aside some time, and get acquainted with this lovely accomplishment.

 

 

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"Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line" by Deepa Anappara

Debut author Deepa Anappara follows the lives of a handful of school children in a slum in northern India in Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line. She graphically chronicles their lives in the poverty and utter squalor in which they grow up. They and their struggling families number among the tens of millions of unwanted, willfully neglected human afterthoughts in India.  It’s cruelest for the youngest, the children who are born into the endless cycle of lack of education, systemic apathy, and by the economic and caste prejudice that plagues their society.

And yet, Anappara tells their story with considerable humor, through the eyes and voice of a nine year-old boy. The boy, Jai, decides, after a couple of young children have disappeared, to investigate, the way they do on TV police dramas. He enlists the help of a couple of friends, but they wind up sharper and more observant than he could hope to be, much to his embarrassment and frustration. But the tragic story comes frightfully close to home, and the author makes extremely effective use of her character’s point of view to make the tragic story crystal clear and immediate.

In an afterword the author cites the shocking statistic that India loses as many as 180 children each day to traffickers, organ harvesters, and other seekers of easy gain. The author trains her unerring focus on so effectively that no one who reads this book will ever forget it.

I honor Anappara. She took the mission to draw the world’s attention to this appalling story, and executed it extremely well.

 

 

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"The Leaning Tower," and other stories by Katherine Anne Porter

 

Katherine Anne Porter demonstrates both her uncommon mastery of the short story form, and the idiom in which Americans speak, in this collection. This group was first published in 1944; the stories are at that date timely, topical, thought-provoking, and deep. She tackles childhood physical and psychological trauma, family dynamics, and international relations in crisis. Additionally she covers race issues in America, Depression-era political corruption, and rampant xenophobia in 1930s Europe.

This is truly a wide-ranging collection, and it benefits from Porter’s wise and all-encompassing treatment of the issues involved. Two stories stand out in this sampling. The title story features a bootless young American man who has traveled from the U.S. to interbellum Berlin on an ill-advised search for culture, or maybe a muse to move him. He finds a small group of men his age, but each individual signifies the frozen, even ossified, position of European countries caught in the grip of the prior war’s waste and economic ruin. 

Another story, “Holiday,” has a full and vivid description of a close-knit Texas farming family from the viewpoint of a visiting woman on holiday. It cites the patriarch’s worldview, strongly influenced by Das Kapital, and his decision to lend out money at less than market rates, so that young people can get started with a farm of their own. But principally, the visitor watches the family from up close; the climactic drama, with its outsider’s charity and its reverberant observations, is worth the price of admission by itself.

This brief five-story collection shows great depth and vivid storytelling. Highly recommended.

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"The Children's Book" by A.S. Byatt

 

Author A.S. Byatt leads us on a tour of the artistic and social zeitgeist of the end of the 19th Century in The Children’s Book; the War to End All Wars explodes across Europe  and alters forever the hopes, schemes, artistic ambition, and most of the social activism of the time. The book presents its idyll that will only lead to a catastrophic end; it wrenches all the principals out of their self-absorption, and forces Europe out of its untenable standoff.

The author introduces us to a handful of families, concentrating on the younger generation and its juvenile and coming-of-age issues. Olive, a children’s book author in the south of England, is the matriarch of a goodly brood, and we learn of her children’s quirks and talents as they encounter neighboring families, and their children. Each has talents and exercises them in their own way. As the book progresses these children endure their growing pains; some shine in their various arts and crafts but others must make do in more prosaic ways.

Byatt constructs a multi-level narrative: in one, she paints vivid stories of various families as the young ones and their elders run afoul of life’s harsh realities. Principally it’s the young people who have the hard knocks along the way, but as usual, these knocks result from negligence, or wickedness, or failings, of the elder generation along the way.

The second level deals with Europe’s ultimate hard knock, the Great War. A number of the young hurtle themselves into the conflict, both as combatants and as medical staff. The war makes casualties of everyone: every family is ground under the heel of the great catastrophe. The war puts paid to the fantasy of the international socialist movement, but also breaks the grip of gender-centric roles to which women had been assigned. Their service in England’s war effort smashed the stereotype of women’s aptitude and function in society, and these changes led ultimately to full suffrage for women in 1928.

Byatt uses specific lives and relationships to spin a sprawling tale of English society leading up to the maelstrom of the war that shreds it. We get a full and desolate sense of end times as the dreams and illusions of the fin de siecle fade and evaporate. This is an ambitious book, and meets all expectations which the author set for herself. It triumphs over its rough and rugged subject matter with grace and force and clarity. Well recommended.  

 

 

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"Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

Technically correct and poetically beautiful, Orbital sings a song of love for the lone, madly spinning planet we call home. Roughly 90% through her novel, Samantha Harvey writes:

“Before they came here [the six astronauts on the International Space Station] there used to be a sense of the other side of the world, a far-away-and-out-of-reach. Now they see how the continents run into each other like overgrown gardens — that Asia and Australasia are not separate at all but are made continuous by the islands that trail between; likewise Russia and Alaska are nose to nose, barely a spit of water to hold them apart. Europe runs into Asia with not a note of fanfare. Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels — not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses. It holds no possibility of opposition.”

“An epic poem of flowing verses” — this phrase exactly describes Orbital. Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Harvey’s lovely extended piece of creative perspective on the Earth does indeed flow with uninterrupted beauty. In her slender novel the author manages to take up cosmic issues, issues which her intrepid astronauts deal with, discuss, reflect upon, and absorb during the endless orbits (16 every 24 hours!). She freights her characters with personal issues as well; she doesn’t overdo this, it’s not her focus. But she does do it enough to keep her cast relatably human. No, her focus is Earth, endlessly spinning 250 miles below their hurtling craft. Breathtaking descriptions of multiple dawns and sunsets (eight of each every 24 hours) appeal to our logical minds and stir our imaginations. And Harvey helpfully includes a Mercator projection map of the world and inscribes the paths of each orbit for those of us who like to follow along.

Never have physics or astronautics received such poetical treatment. There are fleeting views of the Milky Way during the brief dark periods, but Harvey confines her close observations for the Home Planet. She composes lovely etudes, imbuing them with love and wonder, and renders them in gorgeous poetry. A highly deserving Booker winner, this is not a book to miss! 

 

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"No Man's Land" by Simon Tolkien

 

Simon Tolkien’s protagonist Adam Raine matures from a boy in turn of the 20th Century London to a soldier in the Somme in the Great War, and along the way occupies a long and inescapable series of no man’s lands unique to himself. And of course the No Man’s Land to end all No Man’s Lands occupies the focus and wields its heavy influence on the rest of the narrative, as it did in England and its combatants at the time. This book covers this murderous crucible, this stupendous stupidity, extremely well, charting its influence on a wide variety of characters. The author deals with it in a way that is comprehensive, wise, and gratifying.

A spooked horse tramples Adam’s mother to death on a London street early on, and disconsolate father and son move to the north of England, to a coal mining town. There Adam’s father Daniel hopes to lead the miners to better wages and working conditions, much as he helped labor unions in London. When they first arrive in the north, in a town call Scarsdale, Adam is a lad going on 15 years of age, and occupies a no man’s land — instead of working in the mine, he continues his education at his father’s insistence, and shows enough promise that he could attend university eventually. It separates him from the other boys his age, and marks him forever as a coaldust-free outsider. 

Tolkien lets the drama build as Europe heads toward its collective lunacy. After Adam enlists, he’s eventually made a lance corporal because of his reliability and leadership skills. Again, he’s separate from the men, many of whom he knew from Scarsdale. The novel flows inexorably toward the Somme and gains gravitas and Adam suffers alienation as the war narrative goes forward. The author handles this superbly, and when Adam is sent home from France for a week’s leave, he cannot shake loose from his wartime experiences long enough to even communicate with Miriam, the woman he loves and who loves him. I honor Tolkien’s very realistic handling of Adam’s haunted self.

And the author handles all of his weighty issues with the same grace and maturity. Pick up No Man’s Land and give yourself over to a fine, gratifying story of a hero who lifts himself up in spite of his fears and flaws, and an author who set himself an immense task and fulfilled every expectation a reader could possibly hope for.

 

 

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"Ragnarok" by A.S. Byatt

Author A.S. Byatt presents her novella-length treatment of Norse mythology in a light-touch narrative showing how it captures a young girl’s imagination in wartime England and has apparently stayed with her for the rest of her life. Byatt appends a short general treatment of her views on mythology, and a couple of illustrations for good measure. I’m no one to trust on this matter, but the main mythological plot and dramatis personae themselves seem exhaustive. It is certainly enough to turn my head, and to force me to reread certain sections to try to make sure I’d kept all the dozens of characters — be they gods, monsters, magic plants, or angry wolves — straight and accounted for. 

Overall it’s a highly diverting treatment, and it benefits from the author’s scheme for presenting it as the young girl experiences it. Byatt departs from other retellings of other myths by modern authors, too: she chooses not to novelize her characters in the sense that she does not give them recognizable doubts, personalities, or psychologies. They are vain, vindictive, murderous, ambitious, or dishonest, but never self-doubting. As the author says in her afterword, “No, the wolf swallowed the king of the gods, the snake poisoned Thor, everything was burned in a red light and drowned in blackness.”

So for me, the most interesting aspect of Ragnarok was its effect on the young English girl who loves the myths so much. Compared to it, in the child’s mind Christian teaching pales to watery weakness. At the end, there is a very spare narrative of the thin little girl’s family — her handsome, intrepid father surprises her by returning from the war to a warm welcome, but post-war her mother fades into depression: the long-awaited return to the cottage from which they’d been evacuated “took the life out of the thin child’s mother,” as she sank into the quotidian routine. For the mother,  “Dailiness defeated her.”

Ragnarok contains the vivid flights of a young girl’s fancy within a poignant — and pointed — framework. It’s learned, aesthetically refined, and in its way, comprehensive. I found it well worth the (less than onerous) effort. Take and enjoy!

 

 
 

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"The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls" by Anissa Gray

 

Anissa Gray presents us with the dire predicament and splintered nature of the Cochran family in The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls. The girls of the title,  the sisters and daughters of newly incarcerated Althea, each suffer from distinct and realistic challenges, from eating disorders to obsessive/compulsive behavior to substance abuse. Their progress and setbacks depend on cohesion and support from within their group, but it must come from members who doubt their own ability to provide it. Recounting how these desperate young people cope with personal travails makes for rewarding, vivid reading.

Long-simmering difficulties reach crisis when the state of Michigan finds Althea, the matriarchal figure of two sisters and two daughters, guilty of fraud, and sentences her to five years in prison. The narrative consists of the flurry of guilt, anger, fear, and psychic trauma suffered by the women in the wake of this verdict. We meet several of Althea’s fellow inmates and hear their bitter, sometimes inspired, reaction to their terrible lives. But the book mainly contains the insights and troubled memories of the three adult sisters as they try (without much confidence) to pick up and move on from Althea’s misdeeds. It’s told in a rotating first-person point of view of Althea and her two sisters.

Ravenously Hungry Girls contains heart-rending closeups of each sister’s struggle with her debilitating experiences and the irresistible force of their fears and compulsions. Gray doesn’t sugarcoat any of these issues, nor does she play them for sympathy. No, she paints her characters honestly, warts and all, and shares their failings and their dogged good intentions. 

Through it all, the author reminds her readers of the institutional and cultural handicaps under which these women live. Their race presents its own disadvantages, and the men in their lives are quite far from perfect. Yet the writing hews to the unvarnished, unidealized truth, and she lets her readers judge the rightness of the characters and the narrative for themselves. For me, this novel hits the nail on the head, and shows its author to be a teller of a memorable story, with power, color, and unblinking honesty.

 

 

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"All That Is" by James Salter

 

Author James Salter brought out All That Is in 2013 and in it he traces protagonist Philip Bowman’s relationship history. Bowman pursues and is pursued by a series of beautiful, alluring women from his youth and into his late middle age. In the period between World War II, in which Bowman serves in the U.S. Navy, through and past the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, Salter’s presentation of his hero’s parade of fidelity and infidelity is by turns emotionally engaging and shocking, but unfailingly vivid.

We meet Phil Bowman as a very young but well-respected officer on a ship in the Pacific, as the Allies prepare to invade Okinawa. He comes home with a new and deeper perspective, having lived through the carnage and destruction at sea. He enters the highly competitive publishing field in New York and soon proves a valuable asset to his employer. Well-known events pop up as background: the 1950s prosperity and confidence, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, roiling social changes. Bowman is dazzled by a Virginia heiress and marries her, and the almost universal opinion is that the marriage can’t last. It doesn’t. Theirs is an amicable separation and divorce. Terminations of subsequent relationships don’t often share that characteristic.

Bowman at times proves a rather aloof partner after the first blush of romance fades. And through it all, we witness all levels of society, and are reminded throughout that the rich get what they want and treat others with disdain and customary contempt. Women raise their voices and push for liberating reforms, but these trends play a secondary role, behind Bowman’s exploits with women. He has one rather passionate relationship with a woman by whom he is utterly starstruck; she betrays and nearly ruins him financially. This event and its aftermath form the main nexus of the plot.

The hero serves as witness to social changes, even if they don’t affect him directly very often. Salter’s descriptions vary between uncannily beautiful and workmanlike. Character motivations strike as deeply true, and action has a gratifying inevitability. We are treated to numerous brief departures from the main course of action: generally these are background sketches of a minor character whom we don’t encounter again. They serve to round out the narrative, add color and depth, showing how social and sometimes insular the New York publishing world was at that time.

I found All That Is quite well-crafted but only moderate in its rewards. I’ve seen deeper and higher praise for it from media outlets, but it doesn’t dazzle me that way. This is not written to highlight arcane truths or to commemorate lofty ideals; its focus on the sexual exploits of its hero, and how he affects and treats his  partners detracts from any such loftier ambition. 

 

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"Daniel Martin" by John Fowles

 

Renowned British novelist John Fowles published Daniel Martin in 1977, and has said that it is his favorite of his novels (in a 1986 interview with Professor Emerita Susan Onega of the University of Zaragoza: Jonathan, Richard, “Maramarietta.com, 2025, https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/fiction/john-fowles/, retrieved June 9, 2025). It’s a challenging work of fiction, and shows Fowles to be a master of the form. It will reward readers who love sophisticated conversation; erudite analyses of aesthetics and psychology; inward dialogue; and unorthodox approaches to writing fiction.

Dan Martin is a British screenwriter who in the 1970s has achieved worldly success in Hollywood. He’s attended Oxford University, been married and divorced, has a grown daughter, and is in a relationship with a young actress about his daughter’s age. A man  with whom he attended Oxford (and is now a don) has fallen deathly ill and summons him from America because he wants to see Martin before he dies. 

The meeting proceeds but events take a sudden shocking turn. As a result Dan vaults into a bout of soul searching; he realizes he has been pursuing the wrong things, including his partners, in his life, and now has a clear vision of what, and whom, he wants to pursue.

And this in broad strokes is the plot of the novel. But recounting the plot does nothing to establish in the prospective reader’s mind the depth of Dan’s yearning, nor of the erudition with which he pursues his goals. There is a lot of give and take, a lot of conversational thrusting and parrying with his chosen lover/wife/partner to be.

Along with deep and sometimes persuasive discussions of society and philosophy in England and America, we encounter Fowles’s playing with the narrative: he switches from third person to first person in an effort, I think, to capture Dan’s approach to his writing, and his view of himself. The book is full of philosophical asides, but they’re always in service to the protagonist’s thinking at the moment.

I’m reining myself in from doing a more in-depth analysis of this book. I will say it is rich in sparkling true-to-life conversation, spot-on in the way inner dialogues of highly educated people flow, surprising in how the author plays with narrative in an ultra-modern way, and rewarding in its dénouement.

 

 

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