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.