Customer Reviews

No Fond Return of Love (New Portway Reprints)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I thought I had read all of Pym's novels, but then realized that I had somehow missed No Fond Return of Love. After making up for my mistake, I would have to say that No Fond Return of Love has become my very favorite Pym work. That the story revolves around the incredibly patient and self-effacing folks who compose academic bibliographies (in the days when it was all done by hand), is a stroke of comic genius. Aside from the usual wit and depth of insight, it has the most wonderfully intricate plot and the most fleshed-out and real characters of all her fine books. Dulcie Mainwaring is a saint! And, a very real person. Everyone gets what she wants in this novel, and although the reader may disagree with the main characters' choices, they are THEIR choices and totally believable. This is also the sunniest and funniest of all the Pym novels, and I found myself literally laughing out loud at the many human failings and foibles Pym reveals in her most kind, generous, and forgiving manner.

Pym is always compared to Jane Austen, but No Fond Return of Love seems to me a finer work than anything of Miss Austen's. I enjoyed every single moment of this book and look forward to a re-reading of it quite soon.

This is the first Barbara Pym I have read and I have to say I was a bit put off at first. It was written and set around the 1950's in London about Dulcie Mainwairing -a 30-odd year old woman and Aylwin Forbes a 47-year-old man. It is quite odd, no very odd. In many ways. There are a cast of extras in it, Laurel, Dulcie's niece; Viola, a rather cynical woman Dulcie meets who boards with her; Mrs Williton, an aunt, an uncle, two highly eccentric neighbours and a very strange bed and Breakfast owner who is Aylwin's mother. They seem to rattle around in this story which is mostly about Dulcie's gentle obsession with Aylwin. She has clearly fallen in love and does all the strange things one does when you fall in love - she looks him up in books, finds out where his brother is, visits his mother's boarding house, and this book is mostly about that obsession - but in the end all these characters floating around seem to tie up their loose ends or become important to the story. More important, and what I really began to enjoy about Pym was the way she tied up different motifs in the plot which were seen from different characters points of view. A stone squirrel in a front yard, a stuffed eagle in the boarding house. At one stage we see Aylwin unpacking, he has bought nothing intellectual to read, just Henry James - later downstairs Dulcie overhears him and wonders to her self why he is talking so Henry Jamesian. Its just a nice overlay of images from different viewpoints and it starts you realising how much in common Dulcie and Aylwin have.

Like I said, I was a bit put off at first, but its a lovely, gentle, clever little romance that fairly soon I was really enjoying it.

If you read novels in order to vicariously experience 1) Passionate Romance, 2) Hot Sex, 3) Violent Degradation and Tearful Redemption, 4) Political Intrigue or 5) Action/ Adventure, it's a fair bet you will not enjoy reading a book by Barbara Pym. If, however, you enjoy reading about 1) Dowdy, Socially Awkward 30-ish Spinsters, 2) Middle-aged Washed-Up Academics, 3) Confused Clergymen, 4) The Finer Points of Anglo-Catholic Liturgy and Lifestyle, or 5) Tea -- you will enjoy her immensely. Her stories of socially awkward people living lives of very quiet church-going, gardening, tea-sipping desperation in Post-War Britain are written with a light, witty hand and a keen, sensitive mind. For good reason she was known in her time as the new Jane Austen. In this one, our heroine, Dulcie Mainwaring, meets both Viola Dace and Aylwin Forbes at a conference for researchers and becomes involved in a romantic triangle that results in more confusion, disappointment, awkwardness and hot milky drinks than... uhh... actual romance. Still, all turns out more-or-less right in the end and all the more satisfying because of it. Delightful.

the tale of dulcie mainwearing and her adventures with a number of academic types. barbara pym wrote with a sharp eye for the eccentricities of her characters. but she did not make any of her characters black and white stick figures. read it and laugh!

I donated this book to Good Will after trying serveral times to get into it. I would not recommend this book to anyone!

Jilted by her fiancé (because he says she is "too good" for him), Dulcie Mainwaring has little to link her to the rest of the world. Although she has inherited a large Victorian house from her parents, she has no relatives, few friends, and a classic Barbara Pym job as an index compiler for scholarly authors; all she has to connect her to the rest of the world are the little fantasies she spins about those who lives are contingent to her own. And thus when she attends a book conference and becomes fascinated by a handsome married older author, Aylwin Forbes, and befriends the woman with whom he had an affair, Viola Dace, Dulcie finds a way to give new shape and direction for her life.

One of Pym's most inventive comedies, NO FOND RETURN OF LOVE is much concerned with the way in which we invent stories about the people whom we live near, and how those fantasies can be even more sustaining for than our actual relations with these people. Dulcie and Viola become stalkers of Aylwin Forbes with little compunction or fear; it seems perfectly natural to them to base their friendship on trading information they've unearthed about him or on staking out his mother-in-law's house together. But most of the other characters are themselves fantasists too: Aylwin has constructed plans of his own around Dulcie's niece Laurel, for example. The novel is an extended commentary on metafiction, and thus it seems of little surprise when other characters from Pym's previous novels begin popping up for little cameos at the novel's end (though this does go on for too long), as does Pym herself. While not as funny as LESS THAN ANGELS nor as beautifully constructed as EXCELLENT WOMEN, this remains one of Pym's best books.

In No Fond Return of Love, three people converge on an academic conference at a girls' school: Dulcie Mainwaring, a middle-aged spinster living in the London suburbs; Viola Dace, an indexer; and Aylwin Forbes, a lecturer and editor, with whom Viola is in love. Dulcie soon finds herself becoming mildly obsessed with the handsome Aylwin; and looks him up in books at the local library and even walking past his mother-in-law's house. Oh, if only the internet had been around in the 1950s, when this novel is set!

Later, Dulcie's niece, Laurel, moves in with her in order to attend a secretarial course; Viola, after an argument with her landlady, moves in not long after. Laurel soon finds herself being the object of Aylwin Forbes's affection, even as Viola continues to be in love with him. What's the levelheaded, eager-to-please Dulcie to do?

No Fond Return of Love is a sweet, gentle romance, much in the way that Jane Austen's works are (and indeed, this novel has been compared to Persuasion). Pym does a wonderful job, in all of her works, of exposing her characters' foibles. Dulcie is a bit of a saint, but not in the holier-than-thou or pedantic way, which I thought was delightful. In a way, Pym's work is a lot like Muriel Spark's, but I've found that I much prefer Pym. Her work is so much more genteel than Spark's is.

My only question about Dulcie is, where is her social group? She seems not to have any friends prior to Viola Dace. Surely that's not possible?

Everyone knows the story of Barbara Pym, of how she was suddenly faced with a publisher who no longer wanted her work. She was praised by Philip Larkin as his favorite novelist and she began to write and publish once more.

Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace are attending a conference about editing and indexing. Dulcie has just come to realize that her suitor does not want to marry her. At the conference one of the speakers is Alwyn Forbes, someone known previously to Viola. Dulcie's niece is going to be moving into her house in the suburbs. Laurel is ten or more years younger and her point of view is used by the author to convey a jaundiced and knowing view of some of the actions of the characters.

In time Viola moves into another room in Dulcie's house. She is doing an index for Alwyn Forbes's book gratis. Dulcie determines where Alwyn's mother-in-law lives and at a nearby jumble sale she sees his estranged wife. She knows that she is playing a sort of game. She hears that Alwyn's brother is a clergyman and finds out his name. His church is located near the house of her Uncle Bertram and Aunt Hermione, a brother and sister pair.

Alwyn and Maurice, the former fiance, attend a dinner planned by Dulcie. The five present include the younger person, Laurel. There are endless complications and permutations in this amusing tale. Viola and Aunt Hermione both end up engaged to marry as it is suggested that it is possible Dulcie and Maurice will reunite.