The Bookshop

Penelope Fitzgerald

One feels the necessity to look askance at any book whose author is compared to Anne Tyler (which seems to be happening a lot these days), but a couple of pages into Fitzgerald's darkly comic tale of political intrigue and I was ready to ditch the comparisons; for one thing, Fitzgerald actually write _about_ things. In this case, she writes about a middle-aged woman, Florence Green, who decides that the town she lives in, in rural England, is in need of a bookshop. It also has an old, abadoned house (appropriately named The Old House) that would be the perfect size for a small bookshop-- so she buys the house and sets up shop. Interestingly, as soon as she buys the house, one of the town's powers that be, a quite disagreeable old bat named Violet Gamart, decides the Old House needs to be a center for the arts. Green and Gamart indirectly mix it up a number of times, and just to add to the fun, Fitzgerald throws in a poltergeist who lives at the Old House and the publication of Nabokov's Lolita. Better yet, at the end of all this, we're thrown the curviest of curveballs-- a villain who turns out to be one of the truly memorable characters in modern British fiction, whose hand in the various plots of Clan Gamart is as invisible and ugly as Kevin Spacey's in Seven.

My only problem with this book, and unfortunately it's a rather large one, is its brevity. Many authors would have turned the above into a five-hundred-page novel. To be fair, most of them would be overblown windbags in doing so, but Fitzgerald seems to leave many stones unturned that could have been explored, and the end of the book's summary feel (the last sentence could have been taken from the close of an eighth-grade book report!) is roughly akin to what would have happened had Sebastian Junger cut out the last half of The Perfect Storm and written "well, they all died."

Still, it's a quick and compelling read, and based on it I'll be looking for more of Fitzgerald's later work. ***