Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym

How it feels to be one of the Excellent Women that men Respect and Admire, before they inevitably hook up with Sluts*

*this book starts with the excellent lines:

"oh god yes, you'd hate sharing a kitchen with me, I'm such a slut," she said almost proudly

and

"I hope you don't mind tea in mugs, I told you I was a slut"

turns out "slut" used to mean "untidy" -- I will be using both of the lines above in future.

I'm not entirely sure how much to recommend this book -- I really enjoyed it, but I somehow couldn't place whether/how much/which of my friends would like it too. I realised while reading it that there's something in common between slow-burny books like this and standup comedy: early on, the author either the author's style/delivery/etc convince you that they're worth sticking with, or they don't. And if you're not feeling the vibe from the style, sticking with it would be hard and not really worth it.

Anyway. There's lots of lovely observations throughout this book, about the way the other characters relate to our protagonist, Mildred, who narrates in first person. We are always left wondering if maybe some of the men are secretly in love with her and she's just too oblivious to notice -- I usually hate it when reviewers say "we" when they really just mean themselves, but in this case I'm fairly sure it's an explicit/deliberate ploy by the author -- before accepting that no, most probably, they just Respect and Admire her, and enjoy her attentions, or the attentions they imagine she must be giving them.

This is another novel that left me feeling how nothing changes, how my life is just like a life from 60 years ago. Is this one of the main purposes of novels? Just to show you that your generation didn't actually invent anything? Sometimes the past is not a foreign country, it's your country with a sepia tinge.

(Here's a review from Goodreads from someone who felt this more strongly, I suppose:

Aside from a few differences--living in the 1950s, being British, not being a teacher, being actively involved in church--Mildred Lathbury could easily be me. She's in her early 30s, she's unmarried, people keep telling her about their problems and expecting her to fix them, men think she's in love with them just because she's single, and she prefers living by herself because someone else would just mess everything up.

And here's another thing that I noticed: her friends and neighbors would often ask her to do things in a tone that suggested, "Oh, well, since you're single, YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO, so could you please _______ for me?" That is annoying, and very accurate.

(I don't entirely agree with that description of the heroine, and I notice various other reviewers interpret the heroine differently, and I think one of the charms of the book is how you can interpret the heroine's emotional valence quite differently according to your tastes).

Here's a line I liked:

I wondered that she should waste so much energy fighting over such a little matter, but then I told myself life was like that for most of us: the small unpleasantness, rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings, rather than the great renunciations and love affairs

And there's lots of other little observations that I'm not sure would work in isolation, but which really work in context -- just the feelings of being a person, imagining your various different futures and noticing other people's imaginings about you.

Finally: one funny aside was the heroine complaining that the telephone should only be used for business, since there can be "no exchange of glances, no breaking into laughter" over the phone. Obviously now people say that text doesn't let you convey emotion, while telephone does -- idk, I just like collecting these People Once Saids.