Penelope Fitzgerald
I’ve spent the last couple of days reading just about everything of Penelope Fitzgerald’s I could get my hands on, and finding myself unexpectedly in a new realm of delicious, sharply-observed understatement. She penetrates so easily the polite evasions we all live by and accept, and can turn a section of dialogue into something extraordinary by the way she delivers the final sentence so that, suddenly, we see with new eyes.
Now I’m all set to begin the memoir of her father and Uncles, “The Knox Brothers”. Since all four brothers achieved eminence it promises to be a splendid read.
In some ways Fitzgerald’s plots matter far less than the marvelous wisdom we see as we move towards their conclusions, which is probably why she never achieved commercial superstar status - despite winning many prizes. Plots and resolutions are something that readers want, desperately it seems, especially when life rarely provides them, and memoir almost certainly doesn’t. How else do we account for the perennial allure of mystery and detective fiction, of thrillers, of suspense genres?
Perhaps what Fitzgerald lets us know in her own gentle way is that we can’t expect dramatic denouements in most of life. Perhaps the best we can hope for is knowing, after the fact, what has happened, and then being able to access the wisdom….
