Most helpful customer reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A lovely moment in a career of distinction, Dec 3 2000
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.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Good but a little unsatisfying, Jun 6 2000
By A Customer
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.
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