Or so Rhoda – the aunt in Barbara Pym’s Less Than Angels — thought would happen when “clever” people came to visit the family. Instead, however, she found that the visitors’ sentences could be compared to “scrubbing-brushes, dish cloths, knives” which sometimes “fell to the ground with resounding thuds.” Observations like this hum through Pym’s novels, which I love. When explaining why she was a Pym fan, Eudora Welty said that these novels are “quiet, paradoxical, funny and sad” with the “iron of permanence in them.” Though Welty and Pym were contemporaries, they never met. One could only imagine their conversation!
Pym, Barbara. Less Than Angels. Open Road Integrated Media, 2013, p. 124.