THE BOOKSHOP - Penelope Fitzgerald - Fiction

When a book is recommended to you on the basis of its near-total lack of plot and exemplary attention to personal detail, you probably know whether you're going to like it or not. This is one of those books. (I was astonished to find that my classmate Angelene hates Nicholson Baker's MEZZANINE for exactly those reasons, the reasons for which I love it.) Penelope Fitzgerald's protagonist, Florence Green, is a middle-aged woman who lives in a remote seaside town in England. She worked in a bookshop as a clerk when she was younger, and finding herself unemployed, decides she is of an age to start her own bookshop, moving to a large, sodden old fisherman's house that has long stood empty, and transforming the downstairs into the town's first bookshop. The problem is, the town's reigning matriarch has pipe dreams of an Arts Centre (to serve, it seems, not much purpose; she recruits members of her family to lobby for it, and a lazy but locally situated BBC correspondent to be in charge of running it, but has no plans of her own for the type or timbre of art to go therein.)

This is the entirety of the action: Green takes two steps forward and one step back, then stagnates, then loses everything as her rival's machinations catch up with her, and she is hounded by child labor authorities for letting a ten-year-old girl help her with the stock, hounded by real estate authorities after a law passes allowing local governments to reclaim old buildings of historic importance, and hounded by her paternalistic attorney and bank manager, who are frothing at the mouth to see her fail. Her ambitions are not too great, but she loses track of who her enemies are, and allows herself to feel a measure of pride, and is ultimately brought down by pettiness. A local elder, perhaps more respected than the plotting matriarch, makes last-minute efforts to support Florence and argue her case, but he is, in a short and supremely depressing scene, struck dead immediately after delivering his message.

THE BOOKSHOP is entirely unsentimental, which works in its favor, for in a book this size, this many depressing events would be entirely overwhelming if rendered with emotion. Instead, the events are relayed with a flat, almost deadpan tone that greatly suits their increasingly desperate irony, and inherent condemnation of human character. This is a book that in length resembles post-modernism, and in scope and attention to detail resembles the best of nineteenth-century fiction. Another reader dubbed it "Edith Wharton in East Anglia" and I entirely agree.