Revisiting Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Eater.

Before the advent of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, before it became chic for housewives to swap stories of malaise the way they had once swapped recipes for Thanksgiving stuffing, and before a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown inspired interest rather than rolling eyes, there was Penelope Mortimer. She was a literary visionary of sorts, not quite of domestic darkness?there is always a brood of children present in her fiction to set off sparks?but of the claustrophobic grayness and casual betrayals of upper-middle-class marriage. In the late 1950s and early '60s Mortimer published a succession of novels?The Bright Prison, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting and The Pumpkin Eater?that might almost be taken as a trilogy, so similar is the existential condition that afflicts her protagonists. The dramas of her heroines?all of whom are transparently alter egos, although only The Pumpkin Eater is told in the first-person voice?are so low-pitched in their despair and so insulated by money that it is all too easy to write them off as cases of overwrought nerves, their condition brought on by too much time and too morbid a point of view. To do so, however, would be to overlook the human truths that inform these situations, the witty if often bleak intelligence that Mortimer brings to her dissection of the glitches?the unbearable muddles?that regularly occur in the most intimate of relationships, between mothers and their children or between husbands and wives.

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