Spiderweb: A Novel [Paperback]

Penelope Lively (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000

At age sixty-five, retired anthropologist Stella Brentwood buys a cottage in Somerset, England, and slowly acquires neighbors, a dog, and a professional curiosity about the country village where she intends to settle and put down roots for the first time. She has spent her life studying communities of people--their families, social structures, how they welcome outsiders into their midst-remaining an observer, privileged to share in their intimate life but not obliged, and finally unwilling to tie herself closely to any lover, friend, or social group. In Somerset, Stella once again finds an opportunity to become part of the web of relationships that make for human society, as well as a chance at true friendship and love. How will independent-minded Stella, Lays reluctant to make an emotional commitment, respond? Written in exquisitely nuanced prose, Spiderweb is a captivating and deeply moving novel, a brilliant vision of our modern experience.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The author of 16 previous works of fiction, Penelope Lively almost invariably lives up to her name. She knows, in other words, how to animate a comedy of manners--how to bring its participants to eccentric and intriguing life. Take Stella Brentwood, the 65-year-old anthropologist at the center of Spiderweb. This lifelong student of human behavior is the sort of mouthpiece most authors would die for: who better to record our foibles and self-destructive follies? Yet Stella is also a career outsider who's never stood still long enough to get her bearings: "In her trade, you travelled most fruitfully if you travelled alone. And it helped if you were footloose and singularly unfettered by personal possessions."

Now, however, Stella is ready for retirement. And once she takes the plunge, buying a cottage in rural Somerset, her detachment receives a few superficial dents. For one thing, her friendships--with a neighboring widower and a retired female archaeologist--come to at least a low boil (perhaps a mild simmer would be a better phrase). For another, the English countryside does exercise its intermittent charms: "A small ancient-looking chapel of perfect simplicity perched above a hedgebank that sparkled with flowers. Sometimes it was difficult to take this landscape seriously--to remember that it had evolved from centuries of agricultural endeavour and blithe environmental disregard." But by arresting her habit of perpetual motion, Stella also has time to review her past--both her professional excursions to Egypt and Malta and the Orkney Islands, and her accident-prone personal life.

There isn't, please note, a warm-and-fuzzy denouement, in which the protagonist learns to reach out and touch: she's English, for God's sake. Yet her story has the power to move us. For Stella is not only independent but self-aware, which can be a very mixed blessing. "I am no longer in business," she muses toward the end of Spiderweb. "I am a part of the landscape like everyone else. And some of us are more tenuously placed within that landscape than others." In the end, even this meticulous transient is headed in the same direction as her fellows. --Bob Brandeis --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

While Lively's novels always reflect the ironies that life delivers to people looking elsewhere at the time, their insights generally occur in subtle, satisfying observations about society and human nature. Here again she writes of a woman whose interpretation of events is distorted by inbred expectations and the failure to see clearly. Newly retired, unmarried and childless, social anthropologist Stella Brentwood buys a cottage in England's West Country, a region of stolid farmers and bucolic charm. Yet she finds it difficult to settle in: for a professional observer who easily integrated herself into communities in Egypt, Malta and the Orkney Islands, she feels oddly unmoored in her native land. Two people with whom she reestablishes contact?the widowed husband of her best friend at Oxford and a former colleague, a female archeologist?awaken memories of Stella's youth, of her one great love, another man who wanted to marry her and the demands of a peripatetic life that prevented her from establishing bonds or maintaining commitment. As Stella adopts a dog, learns about such local institutions as the general store and ruminates on the passage of time and the long shadow of past decisions, she remains unaware of the whirlwind of verbal abuse and simmering violence in the house just down the lane, where an emotionally deranged woman, her husband and her damaged adolescent sons are time bombs about to impact on Stella's life. Lively wisely avoids melodrama in the denouement, choosing instead to suggest Stella's poignant realization that her detachment, independence and self-sufficiency will determine her future as well as her past. Though the leisurely pace and purposefully digressive narrative are somewhat slow to build suspense, Lively's perceptive vision about the insularity of modern life rings true.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 218 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060929723
• ISBN-13: 978-0060929725
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #272,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Puzzling Novel That Doesn't Quite Gel, May 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Spiderweb: A Novel (Hardcover)

Penelope Lively so dazzled us with her Booker Prize winning novel "Moon Tiger," that the publication of a new novel is a real event. But this is the problem, then, with "Spiderweb." Ms. Lively has raised our expectations to such heights that it is difficult for even her to fulfill them. In "Spiderweb," Ms. Lively's obsessions are again on display. The protagonist, a 65-year-old just-retired social anthropologist, moves into a cottage in the country and mulls over her exotic past even while studying her new surroundings with an anthropological eye. As in "Heat Wave," there are visits to stately homes, and as before, British archaeology makes a cameo appearance. But somehow, all of these elements do not add up, juxtaposed as they are against the story of the unrelentingly revolting and dangerous neighbors down the lane. Lively fans will want to read this novel; new readers would do better to start with "Moon Tiger" or her memoir, "Oleander Jacaranda."

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good but a little unsatisfying, June 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Spiderweb: A Novel (Paperback)

This is the story of Miss Stella Brentwood, a recently retired, successful anthropologist who suddenly realizes that she is old and lacks any strong connections after a life lived all over the world, and attempts to put down roots for the first time by buying a cottage in the English countryside, but has trouble shaking her habitual scientific detachment and continues to observe her own countrymen as if they were a kind of exotic tribe. (The "spiderweb" of the title refers to Stella's perception of the ties that bind people to one another, which she has always managed to avoid.) The book was funny, quite moving, and well written.

In my view, the subplot of the violently troubled family down the lane repeatedly threatened to upstage the rather more tame, domestic, and meditative central narrative, though it did provide a welcome dose of suspense, and was very dramatic and disturbing in its own right--perhaps worthy of a book in itself. Ms. Lively has a wonderful eye for detail and is obviously in control of her prose style, and her cross-cutting of different timelines as Stella reviews her past was in the end very effective.

I agree, however, with the reviewer below who felt that the ending was somewhat abrupt. I, too, kept flipping pages at the end, looking for the rest of the book. I was left feeling an almost painful lack of closure with Stella's character, which was disappointing because up until that point I felt I'd come to know her quite intimately. All in all a very good, but not a great, novel.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An appetizer, not a Main serving, from an excellent writer, September 16, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Takoma Park, maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spiderweb: A Novel (Hardcover)

I found this a small delight from an author who has created fuller, deeper, more satisfying stories in the past. Not as minor an achievement, in my opinion, as Heat Wave, but well to the rear of my favorites such as According to Mark and Road to Lichfield. An awful lot of interior dialogue and telling rather than letting a story unfold. It does feel a bit patched together, a collection of fascinating characters that we dip in and out of, the weavings of a life. Some wise summarizings. But summaries aren't so often compelling fiction. It does add up to something that at times is moving and rich. In small servings. But the ending felt rushed, almost dispensed with too quickly, and I almost felt cheated by it. I felt the author abandoning her character and the story! I literally flipped the empty end pages in frustration, looking for more.