The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

March 20, 2017
The same measured intelligence and subtle humor that characterizes Lively’s novels (like the Booker-winning Moon Tiger) is present in this story collection. The stories often bear rereading, as Lively’s quiet elegance rolls by so smoothly. “The Weekend” charts a series of accumulating missteps in a country getaway involving two couples and a disturbingly unflappable eight-year-old. “Mrs. Bennet” is an homage to Austen, the title character very like the matriarch in Pride and Prejudice, with a houseful of unmarried daughters and struggling to keep her house together in Britain in 1947. “Theory of Mind” charts the romantic relationship of two highly cerebral people. Most of the stories are short and feel like beautifully rendered portraits or slices of life. The title story is narrated by the singularly erudite hen living in the garden of an ambitious Roman politician and narrowly escaping the eruption of Vesuvius. Two longer stories, “A Biography” and “The Bridge,” have shaggier structures and deal idiosyncratically with the advantages and disadvantages of advanced age, the former via a series of interviews and the latter in a first-person narrative. An effortless and masterly collection.

Starred review from March 1, 2017
How well do we ever know another person? That's the leitmotif of this witty but piercing new collection by Man Booker winner Lively (Dancing Fish and Ammonites, 2014, etc.).The title story sets the tone: narrated by an exotic pet in Roman Pompeii, shortly to be eradicated by the C.E. 79 eruption of Vesuvius, it shows genuine communication only between the purple swamp hen and a slave girl in an aristocratic household otherwise roiled by people who can't get along and communicate (angrily) only in a crisis. The collection's keystone, "A Biography," couples interviews conducted for a book about Lavinia Talbot, a charismatic public intellectual, with the interviewees' private, unshared recollections to create a poignant portrait of a woman with a secret wound at the heart of her life's work and to simultaneously suggest that we can never fully understand her. "Lorna and Tom" also painfully demonstrates the possibility of loving someone without ever really grasping his or her essence, giving a quietly wrenching account of a marriage that ultimately founders on the shoals of Britain's terminal class-consciousness--though not, because Lively rarely does the expected, in the way readers might anticipate. Yet there are also radiant stories like "Point of View," in which a screenwriter and her live-in boyfriend, each yearning for a child and convinced the other doesn't want one, finally stumble into mutual accord. "The Bridge" is perhaps the collection's best showcase of Lively's gift for embracing the full range of human complexity. "How can something have happened twice over? One way for him, another for me?" asks a woman about a family tragedy she and her husband literally saw differently. Yet the story's conclusion shows the characters groping to surmount their limited perspectives, prodded by love. A droll update of Pride and Prejudice and a couple of satisfyingly scary ghost stories provide some lighter entertainment, and even in her darkest tales, Lively's fundamentally serious take on our tangled emotional lives is never bleak, merely ruefully accepting. A treasure trove of fictional gems.

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Starred review from June 15, 2017

Many stories here feature women getting on in age, reflecting on their long and interesting lives. In "Old as the Hills," two women meet for lunch at a quiet restaurant to discuss what they have in common--namely, a recently deceased husband who one stole from the other. In "License To Kill," 84-year-old Pauline is out on a shopping trip with her young minder, who has fixed ideas about her elderly charge, until she learns that Pauline once worked as a spy. Booker Prize winner Lively is equally good at writing about the younger generation. In "The Weekend," a couple and their young daughter are invited to the swanky Cotswolds cottage of the husband's old college friend. While the couples mingle uncomfortably, their daughter makes an unusual friend. The final story, "The Third Wife" is a wicked delight: A wily scoundrel who marries and then abandons rich women from whom he embezzles fortunes finally gets his comeuppance when the third wife catches on to his game. VERDICT Lively (How It All Began), like many of her octogenarian characters, remains an acutely perceptive observer of the human condition. This charming collection, ranging from ancient Pompeii to modern-day London, is proof that her gifts have only ripened with age.

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