[Penelope Lively's] quality can best be conveyed by saying that she is the kind of writer that Barbara Pym might have been if she had married and had children. The setting of Judgement Day … might be that of a Pym novel; and that, at the centre of this village and the events that take place in it, there should always loom up the church of St Peter and St Paul, with a 14th-century wall-painting, the Doom, as 'its glory and surprise', is precisely what one might expect if Barbara P...

The American Jewish immigrants of Bernard Malamud's stories inhabit a world of their own spiritual past and an unanchored present. Anxious, needy, pathetic, blinkered, faltering, kindly, they stumble through life with only the most tenuous links with the places they live in. Penelope Lively's characters are set solidly in and against market towns, Saxon churches, Aldeburgh beaches, High Streets with Smiths, Boots and Sainsburys in them. Yet Malamud's favourite theme—of giving and...

[In Treasures of Time, Lively] reveals a gift for highlighting character-types, picking out revealing details of social behaviour, manner and conversation, and a certain ability to hit a nail ironically on the head. She is technically inventive and assured, and her book reads a little like the work of Elizabeth Jane Howard—a compliment indeed. Yet I do not think she has yet proved that she possesses a talent for writing adult fiction of anything like the high order of her children's books. Tre...

In Perfect Happiness Penelope Lively concerns herself with the subject of loss. This, so often in the past, has proved a dangerous subject, particularly in the hands of women writers. It induces characters with that modern disease of scurrying to find themselves, and delivering us with the unedited findings. It deprives many a writer of all humour. Miss Lively has achieved a considerable triumph, therefore, in managing to cross such tricky terrain without so much as a stumble. In her exploration of three di...

In Laddenham, a neat village near the light industrial township of Spelbury in the southern English heartlands, Penelope Lively has set a nicely pertinacious account of the secular assumptions and irrational impulses which govern the way many of us live now. Judgement Day centres on the relationship the agnostic Clare Paling forms with a well-meaning and feeble man of God, and his church…. The ostensibly tidy lives of the retired, the respectable burghers, the young marrieds and their children, are m...

In one of the 14 stories in Nothing Missing but the Samovar, an elderly spinster makes a habit of walking in Hyde Park: 'She studied her fellow walkers with avid attention … She delighted in novelty: eccentricities of dress, perplexing snatches of conversation. She moved up and down the wide paths, across the grass, between the neat flowerbeds, alert and expectant—an inquisitive ghost foraging among the walkers.' It goes without saying that people who write about people are inqui...

Penelope Lively has chosen to write about the painful problems facing a woman after the sudden death of her husband…. The book's title, Perfect Happiness, refers to the past. Frances has to adjust to the loss of that happiness and the near-certainty that, at her age, 49, she will find no equivalent. Perfect Happiness is not depressing. Nor is it sentimental. Frances fights back in two ways. She learns how to summon up, deliberately, past moments of happiness, instead of letting them come at he...

[The main theme of "Perfect Happiness" is not] just the matter of bereavement, as experienced by her fiftyish heroine, Frances, who, when we first meet her, is "recollecting not in tranquility but in ripe howling grief her husband Steven dead now eight months two weeks one day." The theme is also how the past is changed by the present, the way time intersects with and refracts our feelings, the way the physical world around us can be both a "solace and a mockery." W...

Penelope Lively exemplifies her name and [with Next to Nature, Art she] surpasses her previous achievements in fiction. She has produced a splendid satire on the pretensions of the early 1970s in Britain, and made a number of timely sideswipes for sanity in her cool and didactic appraisal of talent. Framleigh is a 'creative Study Centre' run by Toby, a bisexual poseur, who screws money out of what he calls 'ordinary people' who come for week-long courses in art, pottery and sculp...

Penelope Lively gets better with every book. In Treasures of Time she raises all sorts of issues about the past. Does a place have an atmosphere given by its history? Or is the genius loci entirely subjective, dependent on the onlooker? Tom, the postgraduate student of 18th-century antiquarianism, is asked by a party of Japanese tourists to accompany them round Oxford and its environs—and 'explain'. Almost everything is misunderstood by the visitiors…. Tom concludes that '...

[In "Next to Nature, Art," something] is wrong at Framleigh Hall, deep in the Warwickshire countryside. And we soon discover the problem is that the 18th-century manor house is now the Framleigh Creative Study Centre, an "artistic sanctuary."… Toby, Paula, his mistress, Bob, a potter, and Greg, a pretentious Yank poet, talk endlessly about art while having almost no talent themselves. But they are shrewd salesmen of the "Framleigh Ideal," and they impress the...

[An] orthodox television production is the subject of Treasures of Time. The overt subject at any rate: Penelope Lively has always been preoccupied with time, continuity and patterns of accretion, and these are no less integral to her adult than her juvenile fiction. History and archaeology provide the means to rationalise the obsession, and these disciplines loom in the background of her new novel. A documentary series is to feature the work of the late Hugh Paxton, celebrated for his excavations at a site...

[Judgement Day is about decay]. Set in a credible modern (i.e., socially heterogenous) English village, it chronicles the impact which the arrival of an intelligent young couple has on the circle of dead-heads who manage the affairs of the local church. The focus of the action is a fund-raising project designed to provide the kind of cash needed to restore the ancient fabric. That this project has a rather ambiguous conclusion is neither here nor there, for Ms Lively's quarry is really the forces of ...

There is nothing very original about the plot [of The Road to Lichfield]…. The book is lifted out of the ordinary by its author's treatment of her two main themes: continuity and memory. Is the past 'something people carry around like a millstone' or 'what they prop themselves up with'? Does memory distort or preserve?… Is domestic harmony gained only by 'the deft avoidance of all those rogue subjects that can shatter the smooth passage of a meal...