Finally, something for the topic

Just finished Penelope Lively's Spiderweb. She's a British novelist who won a Booker prize for one of her earlier works. She's not big into plots per se - she makes heavy use of barely delineated flashbacks in the life of her protagonist to tell the story (roughly) of Stella Brentwood, a retired social anthropologist recently removed to a small town in Somerset. After years of living a solitary, itinerant life studying various cultures around the world from a scholarly distance, she's suddenly finding herself trying to figure out how to live in the world, rather than alongside it. Aided by the widower of a college friend, Stella slowly anchors into this new world.

Parallel to this 'plot' is a contemporary thread following a deeply disturbed family whose property neighbors Stella's. In spite of all her training and expertise in understanding kinship structures in foreign societies, Stella fails to recognize the slow implosion taking place just over her property line.

Lively's a tough author for me to love, but I do like her work. Her way with words is well-honed and wonderfully descriptive, but it's often hard to grasp what it is that she's trying to say. Her books are rather intensely British - much less action-driven and more towards the realm of loose character study. Spiderweb is a true 'library book' - best read in that quiet, contemplative environment. I'll give it 3 stars out of 5 - pleasant enough, but not a sock-knocker in terms of quality.