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Books Diary

 It's a big season for Barbara Pym, a major novelist from the fifties. Pym is the subject of a new biography by Paula Byrne.


Here are the things people say about Ms. Pym. She was like Jane Austen, only funnier. She was the most undervalued great artist of the twentieth century (or something similarly hyperbolic). She liked to write about gossip, and about "church jumble sales."

Pym had a humorously bleak outlook on life, and the bleakness is captured in several of her titles: "No Fond Return of Love," "Less Than Angels," "An Unsuitable Attachment," "The Sweet Dove Died." Many critics think "Quartet in Autumn," a Booker finalist, was the best of Pym's work. But "Sweet Dove" and "Some Tame Gazelle" and "A Glass of Blessings" are all books with loud admirers.

A Pym novel tends to have slightly ridiculous people humming along in a depressed post-war community. A single woman in her late thirties will long for the company of an obviously gay man. A husband will dream of a love affair in Paris (but he'll abandon his train in a suburb of London). An old, imperious aunt will make wrong statements -- and then mock the people around her, who are actually correct.

A Pym ending is generally not very happy -- but her characters show stoicism, and they just keep trudging along. Oddly enough, the grimness in the books is sort of comforting; Pym seems to say, "Life is tough, and I understand this. You aren't the only one having certain troubling thoughts."

Pym worked in an office of anthropologists -- and it's said that the work colored her own writing. This might be true, or maybe she was just a genius. Who knows.

In any case, she has been a favorite of mine since my early twenties, and I'm glad she is winning some new attention this year.

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