The complexities of the everyday

Pym has created a quartet routinely drawn characters whose daily lives contain tension, drAma, and uncertainty despite their predictable routine. All flawed and almost annoyingly unlikable, they draw us into their lives and make us care. Darn good stuff, despite the lack of sex and violence and the supernatural.

The first Pym I have read, this was a good study of folks at retirement age in the late 1970s. The four characters are well drawn.

Four to Domesday: Barbara Pym's much-vaunted comeback seems a curiously muted affair but it's also comforting (with this supremely placeable of writers) that, one or two anachronisms aside - she actually says fuck, once, may the saints preserve us - this could have been set in her 1950s heyday. I will long treasure the line about older people heading towards retirement and getting madder as they do, and in dissecting and inspecting loneliness among "the aged", bossy clergy and well-meaning social workers notwithstanding, it's as pertinent now as ever. A welcome resumption after the intermission.

OK...this book isn't for everyone: four lonely(ish) people (they wouldn't describe themselves that way but they would definitely describe each other that way). Approach and cross over from working life into retirement. For some the transition is smoother than others.

It wasn't what I was expecting. and when I was so angry at everyone in the book (I won't tell you why because it would really spoil it), I realized that the author had so meticulously crafted the story that the reader had made all of the exact same assumptions that the various characters in the book had. She had made the reader complicit in that event.

It is pure genius but not the most entertaining read.

This is the first Barbara Pym novel I have read. My allegiances were with Letty and Edwin. Edwin’s life is defined by his relationship to the Church of England and observances of its calendar of days and events and celebrations. He attends churches in different parishes in his neighborhood. The C of E makes up his daily to do list. It would be interesting to formulate ones life this way.

Facing my own retirement, I find myself empathizing with each character—even Marcia who has pathetic aspirations for a relationship with Mr Stone, who performed a mastectomy on her. She stalks her physician hoping for special attention.

Four Londoners, two women and two men, work together in an office, a strangely intimate environment, yet they are virtually strangers. They have the rhythms of their work, always unspecific, never adequately defined, with the two women due to retire. There is a sense of melancholy and loneliness pervading the novel, if not utter futility, exacerbated by the fact that post-retirement, the two women are no replaced. The book was a bit of a slow burn, and it was only when I was around half way through it that I realised that not only was I invested in the characters but I desperately cared about them. Yet, the book does recognise that while there is life, there is possibility. This is my first foray into a Barbara Pym novel, and as she was stated by Larkin to be one of the most underrated authors of their time, it will not be my last. A sad and wonderful read.