what we talk about when we talk about bookshops

It was our first book discussion of the year  on a snowy January afternoon.  Maybe so many showed up because of the government shut down, one suggested. The museums were closed, and those with furloughed spouses needed some reason to get out of the house!  But whatever the case, there we all were - almost twenty of us sitting round a table in the library, a center of community, and we were all there to discuss Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop.

Protagonist Florence Green is a widow whose imagination has been kindled by a vacant historical building called The Old House.  Having inherited money, she sets about opening a bookshop. "She was not much talked about, not even in Hardborough,"  Fitzgerald tells us, "where everyone could be seen coming over the wide distances and everything seen was discussed. She made small seasonal changes in what she wore.  Everybody knew her winter coat, which was the kind that might just be made to last another year." 

But the bookshop project is doomed from the start. The storage room is damp and cannot be used for books and the Old House is haunted by poltergeists. Then a moneyed arts patron in town explains that she's had her eye on the place for years, intending to turn the Old House into an Art Center.  And while other neighbors wish Florence well, they would really rather have a lending library.

There are very few solid customers. There's the scout who comes in every day after school to read another chapter of I Flew with the Fuher... "he marked the place with a string weighted down with a boiled sweet."  A local painter shows up with his watercolors one day, hoping to exhibit them there, and of course there's Christine Gipping, a ten year old girl who comes in to help.

So many eccentric descriptions in The Bookshop made me laugh out loud.  Christine - for instance, who forms a special bond with Florence, had broken her two front teeth "during the previous winter in rather a strange manner, when the washing on the line froze hard, and she was caught a blow in the face with an icy vest."  Christine has no interest in books at all. She has been sent to help rather than her older sister, since "now the evenings were getting longer her older sister would be up in the bracken with Charlie Cutts."

The establishment of the bookshop is central to Florence's story, but books and reading play a very small part.  It doesn't appear that Florence herself reads much, although at one point she orders two hundred and fifty copies of Lolita and arranges them in a pyramid in the front of the store. Neither does she have a head for marketing or for keeping her accounts straight.  So why, you wonder, did she want so much to open a bookshop?

That's when we realized in our discussion, that when we talk about books and bookshops, we are often really talking about community.  "To leave a mark of any kind was exhilarating,"  Florence reflects at one stage, while walking on the beach.  She is hoping to be seen in some way - to be recognized and part of a community. 

Our book discussion groups which take place every month in the library are a living example of this sort of community.  We can talk about anything when we tie it to the books we read together.  I also work at a bookstore in DC - Politics and Prose. The community forged there is invaluable in Washington - especially during these turbulent political times.  Book events each evening provide an intellectual sanctuary.  But those events are more about getting people into the store than about selling books.  And during the snowy days, the store becomes a destination to get you out of the house.  Where else can you open so many conversations with strangers, by asking what they've been reading?  But without the business sense to back it up, such a community would not be possible.

Florence's battle in The Bookshop is a battle to establish community.  It also reveals class tensions between the affluent people in town who want to establish an Art Center and the local working class people who don't have money to spend on books.  In the end, Florence's enterprise is defeated "but defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired," she reflects sadly.

Penelope Fitzgerald's light touch, and her insight into human nature, seems to make defeat more bearable,  as it does in another of her novels Offshore - where a bohemian family try in vain to live on a dilapidated houseboat.  Fitzgerald's characters have imagination, they are iconoclasts, but they lack practicality and money sense.  Their vision almost, not quite, makes things work. Fitzgerald made her subject their struggles against inevitable failure.  And they have such heart. They companion me and although I don't know why, they give me hope for humanity.