the NYT on Human Voices (1999)

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Auditions for Hungry Muses at the House of Truth
By RICHARD EDER
Published: Wednesday, May 5, 1999

HUMAN VOICES

By Penelope Fitzgerald

144 pages. Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin. Paperback. $12.

”Adverbs,” Umberto Eco replied when someone asked him what ”The Name of the Rose” was really about. More significant than his story and characters is the drift of voice in which they eddy. In the same way you might say that Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are about subordinate clauses. A leading action, a statement, a mood are yanked from below like a fishing float and dart zigzag away.

At one point in ”Human Voices,” Vi Simmons, employed in wartime London, brings a fellow worker to stay in her mother’s house, from which a previous roommate had upsettingly decamped. ”Mrs. Simmons, who was generous enough not to learn from experience, welcomed a new lodger,” the author writes. (read more)