Dear readers, Two World Cups and a pandemic ago, I was sent to London for a summer assignment during what turned out to be an extended European heat wave. Denmark was a dry bone and people in France were sleeping in limestone caves to stay cool at night. Even the grass in Hyde Park looked parched and crispy, like sheared wheat. I had lucked into borrowing a beautiful apartment, a duplex loft with double-height windows that the temperatures turned, alas, into a fiery furnace. So most evenings, while the pubs and parks spilled over with delirious Cup fans — England made it to the semifinals that year — I would go for long looping walks, hoping to catch a stray breeze or, better yet, a chilled wisp of central air (bless you, Zara vestibule). The two extremely British books in this week’s newsletter remind me of those wanderings. Tonally, both convey a sort of Celsius cool. But below the surface? Scorch marks. —Leah “Female Friends,” by Fay WeldonFiction, 1974
The pop-feminist meme “I support women’s rights and wrongs” could have been invented for Weldon, even if her prime preceded it by half a century. Weldon, who died at 91 in 2023, was a master of flawed feminine characters, and the central trio in “Female Friends” are in many ways a jerk parade: caustic, petty, self-absorbed. (Though next to their male counterparts, they’re practically angels of virtue.) Grace, Chloe and Marjorie met as children during the evacuations of World War II — Grace came from a comfortable middle-class family, while Chloe scraped by with her bar-maid single mother and Marjorie was the lonely refugee from the big city. Then they grew up and apart, seeking go-go careers or undeserving men with whom to start families. Now Chloe, the intermittent narrator, lives in pastoral passive aggression in the English countryside with an entitled screenwriter named Oliver and their large brood. The glamour puss Grace, shacked up in bohemian London squalor with her much younger filmmaker boyfriend, studiously avoids all responsibility for her underparented offspring, while the clever but cursed Marjorie beavers away as a producer for the BBC. The plot mingles gossipy dribs from the women’s midlife dramas with flashbacks to their shared emotional and sexual histories. But the delivery! Little pearls of practical wisdom (“It is one of the laws of nature that one cannot be watchful and orgasmic at the same time”) crowd the short, punchy chapters. Consider this ruthless summary of late-20th-century womanhood: “We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the destination.” Read if you like: Muriel Spark, Pimm’s cups, posh partner swapping. “London Observed: Stories and Sketches,” by Doris LessingFiction, 1992
I like to think that Weldon and her friend Doris Lessing sometimes strolled around their adopted city together, two shrewd and salty ladies in their element. (If you’ve never seen the news clip of an 88-year-old Lessing’s beyond-blasé reaction to being told she’s just won the Nobel Prize for Literature as she unloads her groceries, please treat yourself.) Both were self-styled outsiders in their milieu, though Lessing was also a literal outsider, having arrived in England from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) via Iran. She brings that stranger-in-a-strange-land’s sensibility to the 18 vivid vignettes and story scraps gathered in this late-career collection. In the opener, “Debbie and Julie,” a teenage runaway gives birth in an alley, leaves her newborn in a phone booth outside a pub and after a hot bath and a sandwich seems … just fine? And in “What Price the Truth,” a successful businessman’s former secretary recounts a relationship history as florid and crisscrossed as Greek myth. I especially like “Among the Roses,” in which a woman runs into her estranged adult daughter in Regent’s Park, and “Two Old Women and a Young One,” a gimlet snapshot of a literary power-lunch spot. Lessing takes keen interest in shared public spaces and the private quirks that percolate there: the tumultuous women’s wing of a North London hospital; a cafe garden rife with human and avian drama; a Tube ride in which Abbey Road tourists, teenage hooligans and a pack of Danish schoolchildren coalesce like off-brand trail mix. At one point, she writes of a social worker’s gobsmacking day, “A rich and various lunacy inspired the human race, and you could almost say the greater part of his work was dealing with this lunacy.” Then she has him shout “Bloody marvelous” into the wind, and sends him on his way. Read if you like: Eavesdropping on public transportation, making one scone last all day at a cafe. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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