An Unsuitable Attachment

AN UNSUITABLE ATTACHMENT might be called the most typical of Barbara Pym's novels, which is a bit surprising because it was one that was famously rejected by her publisher in the mid 1960s, leading to her long spell when she did not publish until she was famously rediscovered over a decade later (and was nominated for the Booker Prize for QUARTET IN AUTUMN). All the types you'll find in other Pym novels--the unmarried woman leaving the bloom of youth doing research or filing work for others; the gentle vicar; his eccentric wife; the preoccupied anthropologist--are present here, and the central questions (as always) center upon marriage and happiness in distressed but genteel circumstances. This is not one of the Pym books that absolutely knocks your socks off for either its humor or its construction, but it's still well crafted and very funny (in Pym's gentle and unsurprising way). There's a great cat that figures as much into the plot as nearly any of the humans, and a splendid and very recognizable set-piece of most of the major characters taking a vacation in Rome where they flirt with one another (always one of the preoccupations of any Pym novel, and probably why she has so often been compared a bit misleadingly to Jane Austen).

Barbara Pym is often called the Jane Austen of our time. Insofar as she observes keenly the social intercourse, inconsistancies and mores of her own time and place, this is true. But do not regard her as a duplicate of anyone. Her dry, elegant observations reach their height in An Unsuitable Attachment, a meandering story which takes place in a London parish in the 1960's. Pym lightly delineates the social changes taking place in England through her assortment of characters. From the upper-middle-class vicar's wife Sophia, devoted to her aptly-named cat Faustina and her handsome if remote husband Mark, to the wistfully mod single Penelope, to the good-hearted if crude working-class Sister Dew, Pym represents the spectrum of generational and class attitudes, and the resultant clashes of understanding between these attitudes. In spare yet well-honed descriptions she evokes a post-war, newly prospering London, a city where exotic (meaning dark-skinned) immigrants live close by old-fashioned people whose relatives who come up by train from the country to open a parish bazaar. I lived in London not many years ofter this story is set, and the mix of characters, descriptions of streets and houses, and tone and pace brilliantly evoke the atmosphere of that wonderfully complex and vital city. The romance is fun, too.