A Few Green Leaves

Rating:
Summary: One of Barbara Pym's best
Review: "A Few Green Leaves" is one of Barbara Pym's best novels. It is full of characters familiar to readers of Pym's other novels; rectors, widows, spinsters, eccentrics, anthropologists and a cat lady. There is romance, but in true Pym fashion it is not always suitable. It is subtly funny and poignantly sad, often at the same time. The heroine, Emma Howick, is a prototypical Pym spinster, intellectual, unsure and perhaps uninterested in the classic ways to attract a man. She is an anthropologist recently moved to a small village to live in her mother's cottage. I discovered Barbara Pym's work while in college and nothing she has written has ever disappointed me.

Rating:
Summary: A Few Dead Leaves
Review: I was keen to read something by Barbara Pym, having heard about her for years. Previous reviews on Amazon encouraged me to select this novel. The story of Emma, a single woman in her thirties who retreats to an English country village to write up her anthropological studies, held intellectual, romantic and picturesque promise. What a disappointment I had! Emma's intellectual pursuit is vaguely dismissed in a solitary sentence as 'something to do with attitudes toward almost everything you could think of in one of the new towns.' As for romance, Emma and her suitors, if that is the word, manage nothing beyond a bit of inarticulate, adolescent gaping and groping. And Pym assiduously avoids evoking any sense of rural beauty or natural mystery.

Yes, Pym offers some wry descriptions of her passive characters' glancing collisions during their Brownian motion through life. Some readers may enjoy the irony with which she manipulates references to English literature and stock props of the English countryside (e.g. a spiritless protagonist named after Jane Austen's charming heroine, and dismissive references to the local 'DMV' or 'deserted medieval village'). But the craftsmanship is weak, with chapters beginning and ending for no particular reason; disjointed jumps among disparate points of view within a single paragraph; and plodding reportage of trivial incidents that never stitch together into a coherent design. While the author is at pains to tells us that her characters have interests -- the rector, for example, is described as obsessed with village history -- they display no real passion for anything, let alone for one another. The characters develop all the way from boring to dreary, which puts a rather strict limit on dramatic movement. It was a struggle getting to the end of the book.

Rating:
Summary: dreary and non-engaging
Review: This is a book club choice so I wished to be conversant for the discussion. However, I could not force myself past 100 pages. I found the style to be disjointed and just plain boring. I am not a fan of British lit in general, the plodding, prim, takes forever to say anything, much less happen style. But this novel was just painful for a reader to try and care about any of the characters. My time is too valuable with other great reads to pursue rather than this book.

Rating:
Summary: dreary and non-engaging
Review: This is a book club choice so I wished to be conversant for the discussion. However, I could not force myself past 100 pages. I found the style to be disjointed and just plain boring. I am not a fan of British lit in general, the plodding, prim, takes forever to say anything, much less happen style. But this novel was just painful for a reader to try and care about any of the characters. My time is too valuable with other great reads to pursue rather than this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Few Dead Leaves
Review: This is another review comparing Barbara Pym's books so that readers can choose between them.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES is my favorite. After writing about London settings, Pym returns to the small country village of her beginnings. But, this village lacks the comfortable traditionalism of her earlier SOME TAME GAZELLE. Much of the book dwells on the changes that have come about in the English countryside by 1980.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES is not depressing, however. It is instead humorously realistic about the incongruities between what people have been raised to expect and what actually is. In this sense, it is the most profound of her books because it demonstrates how we can still get the most out of life when only "a few green leaves" remain. This book was written at the end of Pym's life and it contains wisdom and hopefulness as well as, of course, great humor.

Rating:
Summary: Wisdom And Hopefulness
Review: This is another review comparing Barbara Pym's books so that readers can choose between them.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES is my favorite. After writing about London settings, Pym returns to the small country village of her beginnings. But, this village lacks the comfortable traditionalism of her earlier SOME TAME GAZELLE. Much of the book dwells on the changes that have come about in the English countryside by 1980.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES is not depressing, however. It is instead humorously realistic about the incongruities between what people have been raised to expect and what actually is. In this sense, it is the most profound of her books because it demonstrates how we can still get the most out of life when only "a few green leaves" remain. This book was written at the end of Pym's life and it contains wisdom and hopefulness as well as, of course, great humor.