Customer Reviews

Calpurnia

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The novel starts out well enough. An old matriarch with a scandalous past has died. The central character (Elizabeth)is set to manage the disposal of what is left of her estate. She meets various members of her family and some of her old friends and begins to unravel her past...
Except it's not much of a past. The matriarch and everyone else is pretty boring. One relative likes to watch tennis on T.V. and ruminate on the state of the game in the mid 1980s. Haven't heard people talk about Ivan Lendl for a while...
None of the two dozen characters is really very interesting and there isn't much of a climax.
The writing is pretty good and there is some atomosphere...
Best thing about "Calpurnia"? The cover photo!

Calpurnia starts off with a promising setting and characters who look like they could be interesting and believable, but the plot never thickens. In fact far from thickening, it sort of melts about a third of the way through, and trickles away in a real anticlimax.

Anne Scott's writing style is dreamy and contemplative, not well suited for a thriller or whodunit, but that's okay -- I was expecting a gently unfolding and introspective sort of story, not a John Grisham novel. Any interesting leads Scott creates, though, seem to trail off in isolation from other plot elements, never connecting or impacting each other.

Calpurnia is less a story than a collection of idle, non-urgent questions and answers about a family's life, and it never coheres into a whole that works.

Readers who enjoy characters with a little depth and prose that doesn't read as if it were computer generated in a marketing department somewhere will be well rewarded by investing a little time between the pages of Ms. Scott's Calpurnia.
Calpurnia is not a suspense story and it certainly is not a tennis story. -Ms. Scott will never do color commentary at Wimbleton. However, it is a good yarn that uses a house as a metaphor for changing times and people. Think Howard's End on the Main Line.

As the story ended, I was not completely ready to close the doors of Calpurnia; I wanted to linger a bit in the atomosphere and speculate on what happens next for estate agent Elizabeth, ne'er-do-well Coby and Peg the concerned friend and neighbor.

Calpurnia has all the earmarks of an good read. Starting off with a peek into bygone Philadelphia Main Line bohemia, then flirting with the noir world of erotic art, it's also checks out the underbelly of estate sales. But, despite some persuasive descriptions and some almost believable characters this suspense story is full of fits and starts. There are a few revelations along the way. The neighbor next door to the Italianate mansion does know all. The guilty son isn't. The shady suitor has mixed intentions. The former portrait painter lover turns out to be a pathetic bore. The point is there is no point. What starts off as an inquiry to a wastrel son's supposed role in the death of his narcissistic artist mother ends up with an ambiguous ending where all the characters, greedy or otherwise, exit the now depleted mansion with more or less nothing. Elizabeth, the main character, is approximately in the same hapless position where she started. Rather than a who done it?, Calpurnia ends up with who cares?