Small Pleasures

This bittersweet novel by Clare Chambers was sent to me by a friend in England for my birthday; it was longlisted for the Womens Prize for Fiction (1921). For this book, I chose Publishers Weekly summary of the storyline:

"In Chambers’ affecting latest ... the year is 1957 and Jean Swinney is a single Englishwoman approaching 40 who cares for her demanding mother and lives for the small pleasures in life—like pottering in her vegetable patch or loosening her girdle at the end of the day. Jean works as features editor for the North Kent Echo. Her new assignment is to interview Gretchen Tilbury, who claims to have delivered a child through virgin birth. Wanting to keep an open mind, Jean meets with the no-nonsense Gretchen, who was confined to an all-female nursing home, St. Cecilia’s, with rheumatoid arthritis at the time of conception. Jean also meets Gretchen’s charming 10-year-old daughter, Margaret, and her dedicated husband, Howard. Jean arranges for Gretchen and Margaret to undergo medical tests at Charing Cross Hospital to prove if parthenogenesis actually took place. As the months pass, Jean becomes more and more enmeshed in the lives of the Tilbury family even as her friendship with Howard threatens to turn into something more. Chambers does an excellent job of recreating the austere texture of post-WWII England. In Jean, the author creates a character who strives admirably to escape her cloistered existence. Chambers plays fair with Gretchen’s mystery, tenderly illuminating the hidden yearnings of small lives."

Reviews are positive from both the English and American press. Booklist offers, "...Chambers penetrates the secret hopes and passionate inner lives of ordinary working people throughout her gripping novel..." According to the New York Times' excellent review, "All the characters in “Small Pleasures” seem to be struggling...Again and again, however, characters choose duty ... over happiness, as Chambers examines, sympathetically and incisively, how much self-sacrifice people should bear at the expense of their personal freedom...Chambers reproduces the everyday minutiae of postwar British suburbia, from a dust-colored wool skirt to a pudding made of tinned pears and evaporated milk. Her language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details." Kirkus says that "An awareness of the high cost of that potential happiness weighs heavily on Jean, and a bittersweet aura pervades Chambers’ gentle sketch of an unassuming, highly intelligent woman daring to contravene convention. ... Chambers acknowledges a broad range of human experience. Jean’s foibles, along with those of her irksome mother and other characters, are presented with sympathy, but readers in search of comfortable solutions will have to reassess their need to tie everything up with a vintage-style bow." The Evening Standard calls it "quietly perfect;" The Sunday Telegraph says it is a "quietly compelling novel of duty and desire;" and The Times (London) concludes the book is "remarkable."