Fitzgerald published her first book at age 60, which automatically makes her a hero for aging bibliophiles who wonder if its ever too late to take up writing. Her historical novel The Blue Flower, which I have not read, gave her immediate recognition for her authorial talents. A follow-up, The Bookshop, which, if I recall correctly, concerns a woman who endures the small-minded slings and arrows of the local populace when she opens a bookstore in their midst, was interesting enough.

This collection is a slim volume of short stories. The effect of most of them is that they appear oddly truncated - as if they are moving towards a conclusion more significant than what they in fact end up with. "Desideratus" has an eerie quality, and "The Axe", about a sacked employee whose corpse shows up for work after he has committed suicide seems a rewrite of a ghost story told many times before. "Beehernz", the story of a reclusive conductor, is my favorite of the lot. 1/04

Short stories that reflect Fitzgerald's style of her novels: Deceptively simple writing that captures and reveals to the reader enormously powerful thoughts, characters that seem initially simple but do and say things that leave your gasping but are never out of character. The stories all in one way or another are about power – whether between two people over position, money, sex, land; or even between someone and the nominal home as in the title story "The Means of Escape." There is no sugar-coating, the stories are tough; there is no convenient tying up; the endings are often abrupt, one expecting to turn the page but finding only that Penelope's part of the story is done. The rest is up to the reader, although how the story goes on is simple enough, if the reader has learned from Penelope to be both honest and sensible to how all of us manage to deal with the reality of lives. ( )

TBR

must have been living in a cave. I’d never heard of Penelope Fitzgerald before her death at 83 this past April. Perhaps I had heard her name; but if so, it was on the periphery of my consciousness.

Now I’ve just finished reading a posthumous collection of her short stories, The Means of Escape. After working my way voraciously through this ultra-slim volume, you can bet I will never forget Penelope Fitzgerald’s name.

These eight stories are as well-honed as an assassin’s dagger, as well-boiled as a New England stew (and just as tasty), as well-written as anything from the pens of Chekhov, O’Connor or that other Fitzgerald, F. Scott. These eight stories perform an amazing literary trick: they are as slim as a runway model, but when you finish reading each of them you’ll lie there gasping and satiated like someone who has just spent an afternoon tryst with a generous lover who has the proportions of a Rubenesque model. I don’t know any other way to describe them: they come off as anorexic, but they’re roly-poly with thematic depth.

The entire volume weighs in at just 117 pages, but in those brief pages is packed more comic wit, more evocative description, more mind-turning exchanges of dialogue than any bloated bestseller you’ll find at the supermarket checkout stand. Means of Escape is one of the very few books I’ve read this year where I turned the last page and immediately scrambled back to the beginning to start it all over again.

Of course, I also immediately turned to the Internet and searched for everything I should have already known about Penelope Fitzgerald. She started her literary career late in life—her first novel, The Golden Child, was published in 1977—but quickly joined the growing ranks of British women writers making their marks in publishing (Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner and Muriel Spark among them). Critics started slathering on the praise, saying things like “the breadth of her knowledge, the lucidity of her intelligence and the quirkiness of her characters provide the satisfaction of a 19th-century novel� and “an uncommonly perceptive writer, acute though not sour about human nature and the master of a spare, subtle style.�

I read things like that and say aloud, “Penelope, where have you been all my life?� (saying it “bean� in faux British voice, of course).

The settings of Fitzgerald’s nine novels are as hard to pin down as a still-fluttering butterfly. The Golden Child is a mystery which takes place in a London museum; her most famous work, The Blue Flower, is about an 18th-century poet’s love for a 12-year-old girl. Oh yeah, she also won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for 1979’s Offshore, a novel about life on a Thames River barge.

The stories in The Means of Escape are just as wide-ranging. The titular tale is about a rector’s daughter living in New Zealand in 1852 who promises to help an escaped convict (a man only known by the name “Savage,� our first description of him is of “a rancid stench�). Another story, “Desideratus,� is set in 1674 when an 11-year-old boy loses a precious gilded medal and must go retrieve it from the area’s richest landowner. Still another, “The Axe,� is a bloodcurdling tale of 20th-century corporate downsizing. Fitzgerald moves with remarkable intelligence through all of these worlds.

Binding all the stories is the unsubtle theme of power—the iron grip those with all the money use to choke the lower classes. Frequently, however, the tables are flipped and, by the final sentences, the iron-fisted ones often find themselves sprawled on the ground, rubbing their noggins and wondering how they were outsmarted by the rancid, stinking peasants. Ms. Fitzgerald makes her point as keenly as Dickens ever did but with much greater economy of words. At one point, a character says, “Everybody wants the same things. The only difference is what they will do to get them;� later, Fitzgerald writes, “a dominating figure creates discord.�

At this point in the review, I should bow out with a critic’s grace, perhaps urging you to hightail it down to your local Books R Us to snatch up all the volumes of Penelope Fitzgerald in sight.

But I’m not graceful. I’m going to keep slathering on the adulation simply because I just cannot get over my excitement at discovering this literary treasure. If you want to bow out of this review gracefully at this point, by all means, you’re very welcome (just remember to hightail it down to Books R Us). Otherwise, bear with me as I continue.

The stories in The Means of Escape bear the marks of the kind of craftsmanship artisans in past centuries gave to their works. Reading delightful concoctions like “Beehernz� and “At Hiruharama,� is like admiring a fine silversmithed bracelet or a perfectly-pottered vase. Such great care has been taken with each sentence—nay, each word!—that it is impossible to see the seams.

Because her prose is so intricately meshed, it’s difficult to quote passages out of context without draining them of their power. Still, I am particularly fond of this description of a nondescript housekeeper in the first story, “The Means of Escape�:

Mrs. Watson had no documents which indicated her age, and her pale face was not so much seamed or lined as knocked, apparently, out of the true by a random blow which might have been time or chance. Perhaps she had always looked like that.

Such wit, such worlds of meaning in those 45 words! They are probably my two favorite sentences in all the reams of this year’s literature.

In fact, the language in the entire collection is so perfect, the wit so sharp that I wish I could spend more time with these characters in their fully-imagined worlds. And that is where my one complaint about Fitzgerald comes in (at least the Fitzgerald on display in this collection). The short form feels, at times, like a hobble. We barely get started in each of these stories before we find ourselves at the last sentence. The pace has a strange duality—it’s lightning-quick, but it compels you to linger (harking back to that previous analogy of the runway model and the Rubenesque lover).

Some of the stories seem to conclude in mid-air, hovering there like a penultimate note in a symphony. Sometimes, I wanted that definitive, concluding cymbal crash; yet other times the sustained and indefinite pause works to good effect, making me turn Fitzgerald’s words over and over in my mind.

And now it truly is time for me to bow out with whatever grace I can muster. I’ll leave you with this one last passage, from an interview with Fitzgerald herself in the late 1980s:

I've heard my novels described as “light,� but I mean them very seriously. If ever I see somebody reading one of my paperbacks on a bus or in the Underground I have to restrain myself from sitting down next to them and asking them whether they see the world as I do.

Well, now that I’ve been introduced to Fitzgerald’s world, I don’t think I’ll be leaving any time soon. ( )