Small Pleasures, Clare Chambers, 2020
Clare Chambers wrote Small Pleasures after coming across scientific accounts of tests undertaken in the 1950s and published in The Lancet to investigate whether spontaneous parthenogenesis might be provable in the human female – in lay terms to test whether a ‘virgin birth’ was provable. Her story is woven around Jean Swinney, a journalist on a local newspaper, Gretchen Tilbury, who contacts the paper saying her daughter’s was a virgin birth, Gretchen’s husband Howard and Gretchen’s daughter Margaret. Jean’s quiet, uneventful, even dull 1950s suburban life, lived with her mother is turned upside-down as she investigates Gretchen’s claim over one summer and autumn, as she aims to be able to go to press for an early December virgin birth news story.
Chamber’s writing is elegant and spare and the narrative, part mystery, part love story, part exposition of women’s constrained lives, is compelling right through to its unexpected and ambiguous end point. Chambers perfectly encapsulates the sights, sounds, tastes and feel of 1950’s London suburbia; the small pleasures of the title being moments which relieve the tedium; the last cigarette at night, the bar of chocolate made to last a week, a melting ice cream.
For some in the group, though, the spareness of her prose, notwithstanding it’s narrative drive, rendered them dis-engaged with simplistic one-dimensional characters about whom they could not care. For others, this very spareness heightened the stifling atmosphere of the world described and the latent passions which bubbled under the surface. There was a slight weakness in the denouement of the mystery and for some the resolution was obvious and predictable and so no mystery. More significantly, the alignment of the final scene in the novel with another factual event, the Lewisham train disaster of 4th December 1957 was a distasteful appropriation of a disturbing event that seemed unnecessary. A mixed response, then to a very readable but for some an deeply unsatisfactory novel.