On quiet novels and my first encounter with Penelope Fitzgerald

As I recently picked up Barbara Pym and now just read Penelope Fitzgerald, the term “quiet novel” has popped up a lot. 

I didn’t know what it really meant, so I had to look it up. Poetic Outlaws explains: 

“Rather than climactic plots and thrilling storylines meant purely to entertain, a quiet novel speaks more to our inner life. They are contemplative works of art that derive meaning from silence rather than spectacle. They are novels that exchange action for reflection, and drama for a deeper emotional experience.

What moves them is not plot or conflict, but the slow and subtle currents of everyday life, the humdrum, the secret emotions, the stillness among universal chaos.

[…] The magic of these novels is their restraint. They are not loud. They don’t demand to be heard. Instead, they whisper, and in that whisper, something meaningful and vital emerges.

A quiet novel asks you to slow down, to acknowledge, to feel, and reminds us that the trivial isn’t trivial at all. It’s life.” 

I’m still not sure what it is, but the list gives me some vague idea. I guess a quiet novel is one in which a) there’s no strong conflict, the happenings are internal rather than external; and b) the style is slow, contemplative, perhaps elegiac. The main thing I’ve learnt however is that I don’t really care for the novels people usually describe as quiet.    

As written recently, I quit on Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence: nothing was happening and I wasn’t interested in the trivial thoughts of those trivial people. The writing also wasn’t exciting (though I might look at Excellent Women before I ask why people like Barbara Pym). The other day I also quit on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which seemed well-written enough but so slow, so drawn out (though I’ll probably watch the film).  

Look at the Poetic Outlaws list: Stoner is at the top and I have never understood the high praise for that novel, as the prose is flat and the main character is uncompelling; Gilead was good, well-written and moving, though it made some ripples in my mind and is now completely gone; The Remains of the Day might be good but doesn’t seem like my thing; my favourite out of the ones I have read is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but I think there’s too much anger and frustration and even a sense of danger for it to be called a quiet novel. 

Beyond the list, I guess Snow Country and The Sound of the Mountain by Kawabata are also quiet novels, and I didn’t like them either. 

Just not drawn, I guess, to novels in which nothing happens. It’s a matter of temperament. My favourite writers are usually mad (Melville, Akutagawa), intense (Athenian playwrights, Emily Bronte, Flannery O’Connor), disturbing (Muriel Spark, Flannery O’Connor), or exuberant (Dickens, Melville). Jane Austen may be none of that, but I’ve never seen anyone call her novels quiet and I think it’s because her novels are full of irony and sparkling wit. The only exception seems to be Chekhov, who sometimes goes out of his way to avoid depicting overt drama. 

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After reading Muriel Spark (1918 – 2006), I turned to her contemporary Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000), starting with The Gate of Angels. Very different writers. As this is my first encounter with Penelope Fitzgerald, I shouldn’t compare how innovative they are; the thing I can immediately see is that she’s gentler and warmer than Muriel Spark. 

Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are often described as quiet and this seems true at first for The Gate of Angels. She starts the novel on Fred Fairly and depicts his life as a junior fellow in physics at St Angelicus college, University of Cambridge, as well as the (eccentric) people around him; he has a cycling accident and meets Daisy Saunders, a young nurse also in the crash; the author then goes back in time and shifts the focus to Daisy, telling us her story before Cambridge; then the narrative returns to Fred, who is in love with Daisy. Even the accident, which leads to the meeting of Fred and Daisy, is narrated in such a way that it doesn’t seem like a dramatic event. 

Then Penelope Fitzgerald throws a ghost story into the book, told by Dr Matthews, the Provost of St James, an antiquarian who likes to write ghost stories. It’s a gruesome, horrifying story that he links to the mysterious cycling accident. Penelope Fitzgerald then returns to the mundane world of Fred and Daisy but now there has been a shift. Does it still qualify as a quiet novel? 

Either way, it’s very good. I like the prose and she has my interest from the very first paragraph: 

“How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? […] The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.” (ch.1) 

I forgot, till I looked at it again now, about “sailors in peril”. The ship image returns in the final chapter: 

“The cart, like a ship at sea, had a pitch as well as a roll, and there was a recurrent screech from a loose spoke on the wheel, along with the creak of the collar and traces and the blowing and rumbling like a deep inner protestation from the horse itself as its feet clocked and clapped in hollow succession on and on.” (ch.22) 

There are some interesting images in the novel: 

“He hung up his boots, his socks, his sock-suspenders, his cap, like offerings to the fire-God, on the solid brass fender. They steamed, and his long-jointed feet also steamed.” (ch.1) 

I didn’t see anything like this in (the first 50 pages of) Jane and Prudence. 

“He was in bed, on a yielding mattress, which showed that wherever he was it couldn’t be in college. The room seemed to breathe. Something, anyway, was breathing.” (ch.7) 

I like that. And I like her humour:  

“She had been to the theatre a good deal more often than Fred, but it was usually the halls, where if words deserted the half-drunk comic, the half-drunk audience were ready to supply them.” (ch.16) 

As The Gate of Angels is set in 1912, there are lots of interesting conversations and passages about atoms, observables, the mind, the soul… And the novel ends on a mysterious note. 

Knowing my own taste, I suspect The Gate of Angels will not really stay with me over time. Doesn’t matter. It’s a very good, well-written book and I’d like to read something else by Penelope Fitzgerald.