Customer Reviews

Spiderweb: A Novel

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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."

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.

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.

Stella is a retired field anthropologist, past middle age, who makes the clinical decision that, at her time of life, it is time to finally put down roots. Never married (although certainly not without her lovers), chidless, and used to the nomadic life of a cultural observer, Stella thinks she will retire to the countryside, settle in a cottage, and maybe even acquire a dog--another stab at planting herself in a firm location.

Accordingly, she moves to a pleasant village recommended by Richard, the widower of Stella's lifelong (but rarely seen) friend Nadine. She acquires the requisite dog--which embarrasses her with its canine devotion--and sets about forming a life for herself in the same detached role of observer that she has used among tribespeople in New Guinea.

What Stella cannot see, and what therefore forms the ultimate sadness of her life, is that the village seethes with emotions of all kinds, from sexual to violent. Many of these emotions are directed at her. But Stella, as the author subtly but brilliantly points out in a series of flashbacks, has never really been a participant in her own life. Hence, she fails to see or experience reality--until it rears up and metaphorically attacks her. And by then, it's too late.

A deep, disturbing book, "Spiderweb" is a quick read--a fascinating character study that leaves the reader thinking long after the last page is read. And it poses an interesting question: Is it better to live a full life with all its messiness and emotional baggage? Or is it better to keep oneself always separate--thereby truly experiencing none of the depths of pain or joy?

Stella, in the end, can do neither.

Penelope Lively's "Spiderweb" may not be the author's finest hour, but it is a lovely moment in a career that includes a Booker Prize, for "Moon Tiger," in 1987, and a host of other finely crafted novels. By comparison, "Spiderweb" may seem a bit insubstantial (it runs to a scant 218 pages), but in the event, it makes its brief quite handily. Lively's premise seems to be that there are two types of people in the world, those who crave human contact, and those who don't. Stella Brentwood, Lively's protagonist, is emphatically a member of the latter. Having retired at age 65 from a career in anthropology, Stella does the unthinkable and "settles down" in a small West England village, where her attempts at domesticity include adopting a "spaniel-type" dog, which she names Bracken, in a sort of afterthought, as well as inheriting the affections of her late best friend's husband, Richard. But when her dysfunctional neighbors' sons shoot Bracken, in a senseless act of brutality, and both Richard and her friend Judith, who is on the rebound from a Lesbian relationship, attempt to intrude on Stella's hermitage, she disentangles herself from the soap opera of West Country life, and her "character detached" cottage is once again for sale. In spare, economic prose, Lively brings her characters and the West Country to life. At one point in the novel, Stella muses that her career in anthropology reduces to a sort of intellectual parasitism. The novel reader is an intellectual parasite who should delight in this reflection on retirement, incipient old age, and the spiderweb of human relationships.

Setting her novel at the end of the twentieth century, Penelope Lively begins Spiderweb (1998) by presenting a sociological picture of the west of England and the once-remote counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, now attracting new residents from "outside." A letter from Richard Faraday to Stella Brentwood regarding a property in Kingston Florey in Somerset, inserted in the midst of this picture, describes a cottage for sale and indicates that Richard has been helping Stella find such a property to purchase. Gradually, the reader learns more about Stella, a sixty-five-year-old, newly retired social anthropologist, who filters all the impressions one gains about the village and its people through her own experience as an academic specialist in social structures.

Stella has never married, not because she did not have opportunities but because she has been driven by her interests in other cultures and her desire to stay on the move, professionally. Contrasts evolve between Stella's past life and family background, her education, her friendships, and her professional excitements and the lives of her neighbors, one of whom, Karen Hiscox gives new definition to martinet, a pathological control freak who terrorizes her totally ineffective husband, her disabled mother, and her teenage sons, who have problems of their own. Stella, however, continues to believe that "West Somerset would cheerfully bare its soul to her..."

The independent Stella must ultimately find her excitement and mental stimulation in her life in the community, in her phone calls from friends, and in her memories of the past, including past loves. She tries, but her brain will not quit long enough for her to allow her emotions to flourish. She gets a dog from the rescue agency, but the dog adores her to much, and she finds herself uncomfortable with such overwhelming love. She has a suitor, but she cannot disconnect him from what she knew of him in the past. She compares this man to the love of her life, a journalist she met in Malta many years ago, and the man in the Orkney Islands who begged her to marry him. Ultimately, she realizes that her life here is a "web," and its connections may also bind and destroy.

The author, in creating a gossipy and initially cheerful commentary on village life, makes us empathize with Stella, even as we are ready to throttle her, sympathize even as we recognize she is perhaps hopelessly obtuse. We see her actions with a kind of dark humor, even as we may feel guilty for feeling judgmental. The reader recognizes elements of foreshadowing which underlie the behavior of the local people around her, but Stella, the anthropologist, is not privy to the same information and has no way of ever learning it. Ironies, such as these, give the story a kind of universality which broadens the scope beyond the limits of Kingston Florey and offer commentary on what it takes to be a "successful" person. Stella, at sixty-five, has squandered her chance to experience a full life, at least by the standards of most of the rest of the world, and whether she is or can be truly happy is not clear. Whether or not she really cares is an even bigger question. Mary Whipple

This is the first novel by Penelope Lively that I've read, and it has convinced me to seek out others. We all grew up, imbibing in school Plato's maxim that "the unexamined life is not worth living". The protagonist of this novel, Stella, is a professional anthropologist, and carries her habits of observing and identifying patterns into her own life. She examines her friendships, her life, the onset of retirement, the need for roots, the need for human contact. A lot to mull over! Reading a few of her paragraphs [one, using over how to it feels to be excited over the process of learning; a second, over elastic friendships, spanning periods of separation interspersed with short periods of shared experiences] made me feel that I had found a kindred soul.

Although mentally I can appreciate the role of the Hiscox family in the novel [Stella has few close contacts/relationships, and seems to function well; we see, however, the disfunction of that situation in the Hiscox boys], I found their story, interspered among Stella's thoughts, very jarring and interrupted the flow of Stella's almost stream-of-conscious musings.

A very readable novel, but provocative in that it causes us to reflect on what we hold dear and why. Highly recommended.

Another fascinating novel from the award-winning Penelope Lively.
Stella is a 65-year-old social anthropologist, who specialized in studying lineage and kinship groups all over the world. She's now retired, and, on the basis of a long-past visit and the recommendation of friends, has bought a cottage in a small village in Devon, in the west of Britain. Almost without realizing it, she begins absorbing the complex inter-personal relationships of the area--who's married to whom, which items are bought and where they're bought, who's a native, who's a weekender, who's retired...She fixes up her cottage, she acquires a dog, she takes long walks, she visits with friends, she writes a long-delayed article on the role of gender in her chosen field---and she remembers. Much of the action of the book takes place in the past, from university days through her professional career and two major love-affairs. The past informs the present in ways which are both commentary and explanation, as well as being told in beautiful language. Nicely-done. A quick read, but certainly not fluff.

Reading Spiderweb made me more curious about Ms Lively herself. Was this more a loose autobiography of her own relationships and feelings of /or lack of attachment? Both authors and social anthropologists study other people and their strengths and foibles. What I got out of this story is not so much the story --who will do what, when, where etc.-- but how someone else (Lively) feels about their place in the world. This sort of musing is something that probably appeals more to persons over 50 years old when such questions are more likely to arise and the choices made require, if only for oneself, some justifying. It appeals in a way not unlike Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

"Ancestry and happenstance divide the population of West Country, today-people who have always been there and people who came there fortuitously. For these last, fortune can serve up some strange conjunctions." Thus the story of Stella Brentwood begins in "Spiderweb" by the marvelous author, Penelope Lively.

Stella Brentwood, unmarried, sixty-five and newly retired has bought a home in Kingston Fleury. She has been a vagabond her entire life- her profession as a field anthropologist has led her all over the world. She has lived and worked in tents, mud huts and what have you. She had a rich and varied life, but she was never able to make an emotional commitment. The one man she truly loved, Dan Mitchell, married another. They had visited the area of her new home and memories are starting to play out her entire life. We are introduced to her best friend and college roommate, Nadine. Nadine married, had children, and died of cancer. It is Nadine's husband, Richard, who finds the home for Stella.

Stella moves in, gardens, purchases a dog and then becomes acquainted with her neighbors. They are an unusual bunch- some are friendly, most are not. The Hiscox's and their boys are a sad group- mother is angry and abusive to the boys, dad is silent and angry and abusive to the boys. The boys are angry and violent, and we never get to really know them. Their part of this novel is somehow out of place, because it tends to overpower Stella's story, but at the same time, it is their actions that develop an emotional reaction in Stella.

The act of retiring has given Stella time to reflect upon her life. The lost loves and friendships. She regains two friends who want more from her than she can give. We replay Stella's life as seen by her memories of her friends. Stella is smart, but she does not have much insight into her emotional life. She does, however, realize that love and sex are sometimes two different things. She has only once experienced them together, and she let this man go. She does not appear to have regrets, but it is difficult to know. The novel ends abruptly, and this is quite off setting. We don't quite understand why Stella seizes this moment to move on, but in the end Stella cannot deal effectively with her emotional life. She is an organized, professional woman who can only live her life through her work. The spider webs that develop are torn in small places, and there are too many holes to patch together- Stella Brentwood's life?
A book to be recommended. prisrob