Quartet in Autumn, Barbara Pym

Like Letty, the retiring spinster at loose ends, I failed to make contact with this story. It tugged at the heartstrings, but in the end I couldn’t quite see the characters. Letty, adrift in the world, hesitating to join a fellow solo diner at lunch, seemed the closest to fully alive, for me. Perhaps it’s because I’m not English, and Pym is very much so, though I would have thought the lonely older woman a universal type. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t quite know what to make of the story — there is and isn’t tragedy; there is pointed humor, though not as much as in some of her other work. But it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and hailed as a “spare masterpiece,” and I jotted down “clever!” on the margin of p. 59 (in reference to what, I can no longer tell), so it seems the Booker committee and I agree that Quartet in Autumn is, all things considered, a good story.