Spiderweb

Stella is a retired field anthropologist, past middle age, who makes the clinical decision that, at her time of life, it is time to finally put down roots. Never married (although certainly not without her lovers), chidless, and used to the nomadic life of a cultural observer, Stella thinks she will retire to the countryside, settle in a cottage, and maybe even acquire a dog--another stab at planting herself in a firm location.Accordingly, she moves to a pleasant village recommended by Richard, the widower of Stella's lifelong (but rarely seen) friend Nadine. She acquires the requisite dog--which embarrasses her with its canine devotion--and sets about forming a life for herself in the same detached role of observer that she has used among tribespeople in New Guinea.What Stella cannot see, and what therefore forms the ultimate sadness of her life, is that the village seethes with emotions of all kinds, from sexual to violent. Many of these emotions are directed at her. But Stella, as the author subtly but brilliantly points out in a series of flashbacks, has never really been a participant in her own life. Hence, she fails to see or experience reality--until it rears up and metaphorically attacks her. And by then, it's too late.A deep, disturbing book, "Spiderweb" is a quick read--a fascinating character study that leaves the reader thinking long after the last page is read. And it poses an interesting question: Is it better to live a full life with all its messiness and emotional baggage? Or is it better to keep oneself always separate--thereby truly experiencing none of the depths of pain or joy?Stella, in the end, can do neither.

Another fascinating novel from the award-winning Penelope Lively.Stella is a 65-year-old social anthropologist, who specialized in studying lineage and kinship groups all over the world. She's now retired, and, on the basis of a long-past visit and the recommendation of friends, has bought a cottage in a small village in Devon, in the west of Britain. Almost without realizing it, she begins absorbing the complex inter-personal relationships of the area--who's married to whom, which items are bought and where they're bought, who's a native, who's a weekender, who's retired...She fixes up her cottage, she acquires a dog, she takes long walks, she visits with friends, she writes a long-delayed article on the role of gender in her chosen field---and she remembers. Much of the action of the book takes place in the past, from university days through her professional career and two major love-affairs. The past informs the present in ways which are both commentary and explanation, as well as being told in beautiful language. Nicely-done. A quick read, but certainly not fluff.

Penelope Lively's "Spiderweb" may not be the author's finest hour, but it is a lovely moment in a career that includes a Booker Prize, for "Moon Tiger," in 1987, and a host of other finely crafted novels. By comparison, "Spiderweb" may seem a bit insubstantial (it runs to a scant 218 pages), but in the event, it makes its brief quite handily. Lively's premise seems to be that there are two types of people in the world, those who crave human contact, and those who don't. Stella Brentwood, Lively's protagonist, is emphatically a member of the latter. Having retired at age 65 from a career in anthropology, Stella does the unthinkable and "settles down" in a small West England village, where her attempts at domesticity include adopting a "spaniel-type" dog, which she names Bracken, in a sort of afterthought, as well as inheriting the affections of her late best friend's husband, Richard. But when her dysfunctional neighbors' sons shoot Bracken, in a senseless act of brutality, and both Richard and her friend Judith, who is on the rebound from a Lesbian relationship, attempt to intrude on Stella's hermitage, she disentangles herself from the soap opera of West Country life, and her "character detached" cottage is once again for sale. In spare, economic prose, Lively brings her characters and the West Country to life. At one point in the novel, Stella muses that her career in anthropology reduces to a sort of intellectual parasitism. The novel reader is an intellectual parasite who should delight in this reflection on retirement, incipient old age, and the spiderweb of human relationships.

This is the story of Miss Stella Brentwood, a recently retired, successful anthropologist who suddenly realizes that she is old and lacks any strong connections after a life lived all over the world, and attempts to put down roots for the first time by buying a cottage in the English countryside, but has trouble shaking her habitual scientific detachment and continues to observe her own countrymen as if they were a kind of exotic tribe. (The "spiderweb" of the title refers to Stella's perception of the ties that bind people to one another, which she has always managed to avoid.) The book was funny, quite moving, and well written.In my view, the subplot of the violently troubled family down the lane repeatedly threatened to upstage the rather more tame, domestic, and meditative central narrative, though it did provide a welcome dose of suspense, and was very dramatic and disturbing in its own right--perhaps worthy of a book in itself. Ms. Lively has a wonderful eye for detail and is obviously in control of her prose style, and her cross-cutting of different timelines as Stella reviews her past was in the end very effective. I agree, however, with the reviewer below who felt that the ending was somewhat abrupt. I, too, kept flipping pages at the end, looking for the rest of the book. I was left feeling an almost painful lack of closure with Stella's character, which was disappointing because up until that point I felt I'd come to know her quite intimately. All in all a very good, but not a great, novel.

Penelope Lively so dazzled us with her Booker Prize winning novel "Moon Tiger," that the publication of a new novel is a real event. But this is the problem, then, with "Spiderweb." Ms. Lively has raised our expectations to such heights that it is difficult for even her to fulfill them. In "Spiderweb," Ms. Lively's obsessions are again on display. The protagonist, a 65-year-old just-retired social anthropologist, moves into a cottage in the country and mulls over her exotic past even while studying her new surroundings with an anthropological eye. As in "Heat Wave," there are visits to stately homes, and as before, British archaeology makes a cameo appearance. But somehow, all of these elements do not add up, juxtaposed as they are against the story of the unrelentingly revolting and dangerous neighbors down the lane. Lively fans will want to read this novel; new readers would do better to start with "Moon Tiger" or her memoir, "Oleander Jacaranda."