Quartet In Autumn

"I would pick her for any list. I named my daughter (Louisa Pym) after her! I love Barbara Pym. From the moment I found her, she has not left that special place on my bookshelf. I press her into the hands of younger women and most have not read her. So many people who work in the world of literature, and who love humorous, poignant writing, still haven’t gotten to her yet. But that’s part of the beauty of Pym—she was so overlooked and so marginalized, and that’s why she’s able to write about that kind of character. It’s many-layered. She’s known for writing about lonely women who have romantic fantasies about clergymen. They have jumble sales, live in small villages and survey each other for gossip as if bird-watching. There’s a very suppressed interiority in Barbara Pym: people are well-behaved, repressed, very English, and not generous with themselves. There’s always a scrimping and saving element, an emphasis on what would be suitable and not being extravagant or showy. But for me the real pleasure of Pym is less about the set dressing of her world—which I do adore—but her flavor, her point of view. Which is unsparing and melancholic, but a little twisted. I re-read Quartet in Autumn a month ago. It’s a strange novel to re-read with much time in-between. The first time I read it, I thought it was a hoot. It was published in 1977, but it has this late 60s, early 70s flavor to it—this chartreuse aesthetic. It’s about four people who don’t feel comfortable in a changing, groovy London. They work together in an office. One thing I love about it is that it’s never made clear what they do. All that’s clear is that they’re completely marginalized. It seems like their colleagues put up with them, are waiting to get rid of them, and maybe give them little fake tasks. You get the sense from the book that there’s actual industry happening, but these four are not a part of it. [ Laughs .] It’s a little like The Breakfast Club ; there are these four losers who are united by virtue of that. “The real pleasure of Pym is less about the set dressing of her world—which I do adore—but her flavor, her point of view” When reading it for the first time, I thought it was the weirdest book of hers. Because it is weird. It moves out of cottage country: now we’re in London, and you get the sense of a more modern society creeping in on Pym-land. There’s a less jolly spirit. It feels more deranged and more tragic in a very appealing way. But little details stuck with me. There’s one character who has this strange compulsion to not recycle her milk bottles; instead, she hoards them in a shed, or sometimes she hides them on a bookshelf in a library. And she also obsessively collects brochures for holidays she’s not going to go on. But re-reading it a month ago, I was horrified. Because it’s brutal and it’s so sad. Really, it’s a book about mortality—about the world truly having no need for you. I’m also interested in the idea of the context-based friendship: the deep connection that can form between people simply because they’re sharing some experience together. Nothing otherwise would’ve drawn these four characters—Marcia, Letty, Norman and Edwin—together, but they’re in the same boat, in the same strange office, and they come, albeit not in a warm, cuddly way, to be each other’s family. They’re each other’s only human connection. Despite this sustained proximity, throughout the novel their boundaries never really let up with each other. It’s so delicious but so painful. It’s something I don’t relate to—that’s not how I am—but you get the sense, watching these people, that in a way they’re spying on each other. There’s a tenderness; they worry about each other, but they wouldn’t really dare say much to each other. A character won’t openly express her thoughts about the other person’s life choices, but they will obsess over them. Absolutely. There’s this one line: “It was a comfortable enough life, if a little sterile, perhaps even deprived. But deprivation implied once having had something to be deprived of, like Marcia’s breast, to give a practical example, and Letty had never really had anything much. Yet, she sometimes wondered, might not the experience of ‘not having’ be regarded as something with its own validity?” It’s at once tender and brutal and subtle. Classic Barbara Pym. Yes. That’s of course the case in Ottessa Moshfegh’s book. And A Friend From England features a classic Brookner heroine. Even the character in Alice Munro’s ‘Nettles’ is sort of a loner; she keeps losing her relationships."