A wonderful read. Mrs. Palfrey moves into the Clairmont and finds it lonely and awkward. She and the other elderly residents let social airs and personal insecurities get in the way of being friendly and a comfort to each other.

Well... I feel rather lukewarm about it. Everything, really. Not a huge fan, glad I don't own it.

This should be required reading for everyone under 50.

I LOVED Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. Very likely to be in my top ten reads of the year. Think of a funnier Barbara Pym and you'll be halfway there. Mrs Palfrey goes to live at the Claremont hotel in London in the 1960s after her husband dies. The hotel is down at heel, as are many of the aging residents. Mrs Palfrey's grandson doesn't come to visit her... until he does. Many times I laughed out loud, mostly at the spot-on observations of people and growing old. Highly recommended.

This story ticked so many of my boxes; elderly woman, London hotel, mid 1900’s female author. But alas the story just fell a little flat for me. The writing was pretty good but not much happened.

Look, I don't know who's in charge of marketing for Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, but he or she needs to have some points deducted during her annual appraisal. Nothing about the book's marketing — from the cover design and artwork to the synopsis — hints at the dark tonality of the book. In fact, just by reading the synopsis, you'd think that this book was about an old widow who somehow finds love while spending her last days living in a hotel. It doesn't help that the cover artwork, at least for one specific edition, features an old lady laughing joyously with a younger man next to her. At first glance, one would be forgiven in thinking that this is just another Jodi Picoult book.

Rest assured that Elizabeth Taylor is most certainly NOT Jodi Picoult. Taylor has been cited as one of the most underrated British writers in the literary world. There are a number of articles online touting her as 'the hidden gem' or 'a rediscovery', and judging by the number of ratings her books receive on Goodreads, I can see that being the case. Some authors simply fall off the face of the earth, or at least the public consciousness, for whatever reason (although, in the case of Taylor, I suspect it's because people back in the day didn't really know how to market her and her works). It is unfortunate, but it is a thing that happens.

Which is a travesty, in many ways, because Taylor is a wonderful writer. A friend of mine introduced her to me, describing Taylor as the foremost writer on all things related to spinsters and widows. And since Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont seems to be Taylor's most popular book (although 'popular' is a misnomer, since it only has 4,000 ratings or so), I figured I should give it a fair shot.

One thing that caught me by surprise about this book was the comedy that lurked right beneath the surface of this book. It's not laugh-out-loud type of humour, but there's dark hilarity in the central premise: a group of old folks decide to spend their last days in a fancy hotel, and Mrs Palfrey falls in love with a much younger man, whom she passes off as her grandson. The identify switcheroo lends itself to a certain level of intrigue, as both Mrs Palfrey and Ludo find ways to maintain the deceit. The individuals are the hotel, too, are well presented, each with his/her own unique personality, and they all come together to form a memorable 'cast', if you will, akin to a Wes Anderson film, almost.

But what I love most about this book is the way it lures you into a sense of calm and contentment. Mrs Palfrey is obviously making the best out of the situation and living the life she wants to live in the hotel. Yes, she misses her dead husband, her real grandson is not visiting, and the company she keeps at the hotel aren't exactly the liveliest bunch. However, there are worse places to end up than a chic hotel in downtown London, especially considering the 'dates' that she goes on with Ludo throughout the book. As the reader, you are seduced into THINKING that this book is about how Mrs Palfrey lives her best life — but is it really?

I am not going to spoil the ending for the reader, but the last 15 pages or so redefines everything you've just read in the last 250 pages. It flips the genre altogether, so you're no longer reading a romantic comedy with a dark comedic undertone — and maybe that's why Taylor has so far been such an underrated writer. You don't know her until the last 15 pages of a book. Perhaps people tend not to stick around for the end, and brush it off as a certain type of book when, really, if you are patient, it is something else altogether.

My first exposure to the other Liz Taylor. One of the things that most impressed me was how it was possible to sense at all times the many ways this story could have lapsed into the maudlin or merely sentimental, & yet somehow it never does. To be honest I was less compelled by the central relationship than the titular character & her fellow residents at the Claremont; the descriptions of aging are clear-eyed & cut to the bone.

[Read #19 of "2021: My Year of (Mostly) Midcentury Women Writers"]

My parents aren't the friendly type. Part of it is natural reticence. A much larger chunk of it is the fact that, when they moved 2000 miles to the west, they came expecting a fully formed enclave of fellow whites just waiting for another intrepid/well to do/kids in the dehumanizing rat race pair of folks to incorporate into yearly rituals involving passive aggressive one-up-manship, flavorless cooking, and a subtle bemoaning that the institution of slavery ever (seemingly) came to an end. Instead, they got a bevy of non-white engineers recruited from East/Southeast/South Asia, and, being rich enough to pay the mortgage but not enough to join their comrades in errant white flight, they had to stay put and slowly turn on everyone trapped in with them rather than risk humane contact with the parents of their children's friends (and found families). So, while reading this, I saw the ageism, isolation, and rightful fear of injury and thought, ok, that makes sense. However, I also paid heed to the not insignificant number of references to the glory days of imperialism, as well as how such past training must have proved splendidly useful for "cowing the natives" (as the book goes on) but horribly when it came to relations with everyone from perfectly considerate strangers to one's own children. In fact, if it weren't for the severe disparity between the economic well being of a certain pair of characters who, in another life and/or type of writing, would have consisted of a gigolo and their current sugar geriatric, this piece would have been unbearably pointless: not because not much happened, but due to the "stiff upper lip" that allows for elitist snubs, dirty jokes, and homage to the ruling class, but forbids nearly anything in the way of actual communication. Sure, I'm not going to confuse Taylor with any part of any of her characters, but having grown up during the days that inevitably cause the indifferent descendants and the cold blooded monetary transactions in place of family relations, I'm also not going enjoy it.

Life sucks and then you die. Sure, if you live in a land where it's more feasible to deal drugs than to build up a union when it comes to paying off hospital bills, kids go to med school so as to make money and lord over others rather than actually help folks live a better life, and the adage of moving out at eighteen has more to do with maximizing the profits of real estate, landlords, and insurance companies than it does with any sort of healthy society. I'm not going to expect every piece of fiction that ever deals with a capitalistic society to tackle the elephant in the room, but if there's not much else going on and so much of the moaning and groaning could be resolved with a small amount of collective action or at least a spoonful of general goodwill, there's a limit to how much I'm going to put up with reading about a bunch of sad sops who can afford to live in one of the ritziest (and least razeable to the ground according to world politics) areas on earth and yet can't manage to rummage up enough capital, social and otherwise, for a board game or two. There was some charm or two here and there, but it had the quality of a coffee shop romance: the barista is friendly and is the highlight of your day (perhaps even your week, or month), but nine times out of ten, you're part of their grind to afford a small amount of space in an apartment meant for two and stretched out to six, and that romance you're conjuring up is little more than stalking and sexual harassment. I would've felt different if there had been even one instance of one of the senior citizens ignoring their training and indulging in a community of themselves that was built on something like a dialectic rather than alcohol or coercive amatonormativity, but seemed like the most positive narrative instances centered around one or more of them tut tutting and drawing themselves back into their uppity shells, sometimes even to the detriment of their health. It certainly paints a portrait of what can happen, but as I've discussed, sympathy has its limits, and contrary to popular belief, tragedy is not automatically more literary than comedy.

Taylor's one of those rather prolific authors who I've come across on many a list for reading women, award winners, or both, so the fact that this particular piece, arguably her most popular and/or well received, didn't jive with me is rather unfortunate, seeing as how I now have little interest in pursuing the rest of her bibliography. I simply just have a hard time not stripping down a book on a materialist level if there's not much else going for it, and if you counted up the total number of instances one or more characters made a decision and then considered what percentage of those, for all its tactfully unspoken nature, revolved solely around money, you'd get a number that made the acrid social interactions and dismal family situations even more mournfully dull. A popular assurance is that I'll feel differently (aka fall a lot more in line) when I myself am off the senior age, but in all honesty, if my parents had had their full say in the manner, I'd never survive for that long. All in all, as I've said rather unfortunately frequently during the course of 2022, not the best way for a work that's been waiting on my shelves for the last decade to go out. However, know thyself and all that, so I'll simply have to put it in my pile for selling to Half Price Books and pass it along to some other fellow sufferer of the VMC itch. It's a rather inoffensive piece that has some good things to say about a particular singularly vulnerable set of folks, but it's not for me.