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. 

Why do I care about Jane Austen’s ordinary people but not Barbara Pym’s?

I quit on Jane and Prudence after about 50 pages. 

Some of you will probably say I’m missing the point, but Barbara Pym writes about the trivial thoughts of trivial people, and I simply don’t care. 

The novel is about Jane, a vicar’s wife who has just moved with her husband to another parish in a village, and Prudence, her younger and single friend (at 29!), who lives in London and is in love with her married boss Arthur Grampian.  

When we see Prudence in the office, Barbara Pym gives us several pages of the women talking about wanting tea, making tea, telling each other they run out of tea, discussing what to do when they don’t have tea for Dr Grampian, deciding Prudence should borrow the tin of coffee from Mr Manifold, and so on and so forth. Later Prudence goes to lunch, Pym painstakingly describes all her thoughts and actions during the lunch, then: 

“She was just walking to the cash desk to pay her bill when she noticed a young man sitting at one of the tables. It was Mr Manifold. He was eating – perhaps ‘tucking into’ would describe it better – the steamed pudding which Prudence had avoided as being too fattening. She had never seen him eating before and now she averted her eyes quickly, for there was something indecent about it, as if a mantle had fallen and revealed more of him than she ought to see. Of course the women in the office had known that he lunched somewhere – indeed, they had even speculated on where he went; perhaps the vastness of the Corner House swallowed him up or the manly security of a public-house lapped him round. Prudence hurried out of the restaurant feeling disturbed and irritated. Had he ever been there before, she wondered? She hoped he wasn’t going to make a habit of frequenting the places she went to. It would be annoying if she had to change her own routine.” (ch.4)

These are such small, trivial thoughts. 

It’s the same when Pym switches to the vicar’s wife. Because Jane has such a small mind, we don’t see her thinking about the new church, or nature, or religion, or anything interesting; she just thinks about small, mundane stuff.   

“At last Mrs Crampton emerged from behind the velvet curtain carrying two plates on a tray. She put in front of Jane a plate containing an egg, a rasher of bacon and some fried potatoes cut in fancy shapes, and in front of Nicholas a plate with two eggs and rather more potatoes.

Nicholas exclaimed with pleasure.

‘Oh, a man needs eggs!’ said Mrs Crampton, also looking pleased.

This insistence on a man’s needs amused. Jane. Men needed meat and eggs – well, yes, that might be allowed; but surely not more than women did? Perhaps Mrs Crampton’s widowhood had something to do with it; possibly she made up for having no man to feed at home by ministering to the needs of those who frequented her cafe.

[…] ‘Poor Mr Oliver,’ said Jane, scenting pathos. He certainly looked very pale reading the Lessons on Sunday evenings, but perhaps that was just a trick of the lighting. She hurried to finish her egg and bacon in case he should come in and see them at it without being able to have it himself.

[…] Mrs Crampton now returned and set down before Mr Oliver a plate laden with roast chicken and all the proper accompaniments. He accepted it with quite as much complacency as Nicholas had accepted his eggs and bacon and began to eat.

Jane turned away, to save his embarrassment. Man needs bird, she thought. Just the very best, that is what man needs.” (ch.5) 

I give you a long excerpt so you can see what I’m talking about. All these characters are boring, banal: 

“Fabian Driver, doing his pre-lunch drinking in the bar of the Golden Lion, looked out and saw Nicholas and Jane walking home. He had a confused feeling of irritation and envy as he watched them. It must have been Jane’s smiling up at her husband and the awful old coat she was wearing, the kind of coat a woman could wear only in her husband’s presence, he thought.” (ibid.)  

That’s what most people are like, you may say, but I really don’t care for all these trivial thoughts of these trivial people. I had a similar complaint about Cecilia: Frances Burney undoubtedly has great talent for capturing the characters’ voices and it could be very funny, but do I want that many pages of frivolous people talking about frivolous stuff? I do not. 

But that raises some interesting questions. Chekhov also writes about ordinary people, Jane Austen also depicts a small world, Flaubert also portrays shallow and banal people—why is it that they make me care about their characters and what happens to them? What separates them from Barbara Pym? Why do I care about what happens to Emma Bovary, for instance, when she is so hollow? 

(I’ve been thinking about this subject for some time. When I first read Jane Austen, I thought her characters didn’t have the depth or complexity of Tolstoy’s characters. And yet to me they’re alive, and many of them have lived with me over the years, like Tolstoy’s characters. I have often said my favourite Austen novel is Mansfield Park, followed by Persuasion, but over the past year or so, I’ve found myself often thinking about Pride and Prejudice, especially Mr and Mrs Bennet). 

Of course, some of you might say you don’t like Jane Austen because it’s such a circumscribed world, or you don’t like Flaubert because Emma Bovary is so shallow compared to Anna Karenina—it’s personal taste and perhaps these questions are more for myself. But Jane Austen, Flaubert, and Chekhov—regardless of personal taste—are all canonical, influential authors, whereas Frances Burney and Barbara Pym don’t quite have the same status. 

And if we broaden the question, realist novelists address the everyday and write about ordinary people—not all of them depict the whole society and not all of them write about big questions (like life and death, God’s existence, or the meaning of life)—how do they do it? How do they get us to care about their characters? 

Let’s discuss.