Binge-reading Penelope Fitzgerald

It's a New Year, and I need to get back into the blogging habit... is that a resolution or wishful thinking? Well, here's a start...

Penelope Fitzgerald's novels tend to be quite short– verging on novellas– so it's not a huge commitment to read a few of them at a stretch. Each is exemplary in storytelling, character development, sense of place and time, language, tone, and wit.

Among the themes Fitzgerald limned in her books, the pitfalls of romanticism (small r and big R) is a constant. Many of her best characters are hard-headed realists who nevertheless can't quite resist succumbing to a romantic notion; meanwhile the truly romantic fools are subjected to pointed but sympathetic satire.

Fitzgerald often liked to end a novel full stop, with an appearance or re-appearance that prompts, "what happens next?" Trite in the hands of a lesser artist, movingly satisfying in hers. The natural solution to every such cliffhanger is: read another of her books.

The Bookshop (1978): Florence opens a bookshop in a small coastal town. Feathers are ruffled. Tragicomedy ensues.

Offshore (1979): Intersecting lives of houseboat dwellers on the Thames. It won the Booker prize. We have a few communities of houseboats in the Bay Area, from the most famous (Sausalito) to San Francisco to Redwood City. Fitzgerald's novel is utterly convincing in its portrayal of the kinds of outsiders who would choose to live on the watery urban margins, and the simultaneous strength and limits of their communal solidarity.

The Beginning of Spring (1988): A Moscow-based British printer must care for his three children when his wife leaves him, as well as deal with the strange politics of Russia on the eve of the Revolution. Blogged already here. Perhaps her best.

The Gate of Angels (1990): A chance encounter results in love at first sight for romantic Cambridge physicist Fred Fairly, and in curious attraction for pragmatic, hard-knocks Daisy Saunders. As in The Bookshop and Offshore, The Gate of Angels employs Fitzgerald's gift for drawing vivid, complex female characters as a vehicle for her understated, humanistic feminism.

The Blue Flower (1995): A historical novel based on the romantic obsession of the early German Romantic Novalis. It is a fascinating if bizarre little tale, and its fictional re-creation of a very different time and place on the cusp of entering modernity is believable and compelling.