The Paying Guests by Sarah WatersRiverhead Books (Penguin), 2014

The Paying Guests is part romance, part crime story, but isn’t only either of those things: the first book Waters mentions in her Author’s Note is Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, and I wonder how this book reads to someone who has read a lot of the authors whose work Humble explores. I read this book mostly for plot, and as a plot-heavy book, it’s pretty satisfying: some of the plot points are obvious, but I didn’t care; the suspense and tension of other things drew me along.

But maybe the plot isn’t really the point. The story centers around Frances Wray, a “spinster” in her mid-twenties who lives in a too-large house in South London with her mother. It’s 1922; Frances’s brothers both died in the War, and her father is dead as well. Because her father mismanaged the family’s money, Frances and her mother have to take in lodgers, the “paying guests” of the title. The lodgers, Lilian and Leonard Barber, are a young married couple, and Frances finds her life entangled with theirs after she and Lilian begin a friendship that’s tentative at first. There’s lots about, well, class, domesticity, and gender in the novel (and a little bohemianism, too); there’s a lot about the structure of society, and personhood in relation to the larger world.

Frances has given up her dreams in deference to her mother and a sense of duty: when she was twenty, she had a love affair with a woman a year younger, and was planning to move in with her, but after her father’s death she felt she had to stay at home to take care of her mother and the house. At the start of the book Frances comes off as a little uptight: her life is so much drudgery, cleaning, worrying about money; there seems little room in it for joy. But there is, sometimes: she describes feeling an “electric charge” when walking through London alone:

She never felt the excitement she that she felt now, seeing the fall of the shadow of a railing across a set of worn steps. Was it foolish, to feel like that about the shadow of a railing? Was it whimsy? She hated whimsy. But it only became whimsy when she tried to put it into words. If she allowed herself to simply feel it… There. It was like being a string, and being plucked, giving out the single, pure note that one was made for. How odd, that no one else could hear it! If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they’d never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconists’, were the truest things in it. (36)

Maybe those two things are really what the book is about: moments of electricity and questions of truth, the question of what the truest things are.


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2 responses to “The Paying Guests by Sarah WatersRiverhead Books (Penguin), 2014”

  1. Jenny @ Reading the End Avatar

    Some of the plot points were a little predictable, but I was comfortable with it. The writing was so gorgeous, and the predictability of the plot felt even a little bit like a plus — like the way the story went was inevitable.

  2. Heather Avatar
    Heather

    Yeah, totally – since so much of the story was how something starts and then sweeps people along. And mm, yes, definitely gorgeous writing.

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