The Purple Bird of Pompeii

I’m really enjoying a book of Penelope Lively’s short stories published in 2016 and titled The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories. Lively’s lean prose reminds me of another Penelope: Penelope Fitzgerald, my favorite English novelist at the moment.

The Porphyrio porphyrio of the title story narrates the last day in the garden of the Pompeian house of Quintus Pompeius. Elsewhere a thoughtless couple of young “artists” end up painting a mural in a remote Spanish village house—and carrying water from the well to pay their keep when their car breaks down. A couple married long enough for the shine to be off have a row and make it up. A graduate student writing about her own family history has a momentarily dangerous identification with an ancestor. A woman invites the “other woman” who stole her husband forty-two years before to have it out over lunch. In a series of interviews with sister, friends, lovers and husband of her subject, a biographer may have uncovered the truth both lover and husband tried to conceal from her—which as it happens neither knows the whole of. Will it be in the biography? A young caregiver discovers her charge has a shocking past in “License to Kill.” In these stories, just the first half of the book, Lively uses a refreshing variety of points of view: the bird, the young caregiver, several people in their eighties, and all the interviewees of the biographer. The fifteen stories here average about a dozen pages each and are told in clear and spare prose.

Her subject, much of the time, is what happens instead of the happily-ever-after, though the outcomes are not all unhappy. She doesn’t repeat herself, and in only one story does the scale seem inappropriate: “Lorna and Tom” seems more in need of a novel’s scope—but Scott Fitzgerald already wrote it and called it, not Nicole and Dick, but Tender Is the Night.

Often her couple will just be “rubbing along comfortably,” to use one of Lively’s expressions, when a new job project or a new house will change the dynamics of their relationship. Houses are important in these stories and in two, “DIY” and “The Weekend,” they have more than natural resonance. Lively cultivates both small surprises at the ends of stories and gradual recognition throughout. She concludes with something of a mystery thriller, also about marriage.