The Pumpkin Eater

To describe this finely constructed and moving novel as the story of a woman's emotional breakdown and recovery is both true and inadequate. The Pumpkin Eater is a rare, profoundly disturbing book, the kind that perceptive readers must wish would never end. It is also a gratifying book in its revelation of a tragic woman painfully trying to find her way in a world where she has lost touch with reality.
Readers learn a great deal about the "I" of the story--a great deal more than she knows about herself--an the fascinating portrait that soon emerges is a masterful creation of one of the most gifted novelists writing today.
The "I" of The Pumpkin Eater never reveals her name, or the number of children she has. There seems to be an uncounted horde, a chorus innocently unaware of the tragedy in which they are all involved. She has been married three times in the past in a sort of Golden Age, a happy era without money and without cares. But now she is married to a successful film writer, and reality with its disillusions and compromises is closing in.
It is through a number of apparently unrelated scenes, many presented out of time sequence but with an intense logic all their own. and each so beautifully selected and so carefully juxtaposed, that the pattern of this brilliant novel becomes clear.
The means by which she is forced to accept the world and to deal with evil are harsh, but point by telling point she relates a story that the reader lives with her. Her absolute honesty, her tough humour, and her utter lack of self-pit, make a most forceful and appealing woman. "Some of these things happened," she says, looking back across the golden years, "and some were dreams. They are all true, as I understood truth. They are all real, as I understood reality."
The Pumpkin Eaters, like all of Penelope Mortimer's extraordinary fiction, is written with the deft wit and intelligence that have earned her wide critical acclaim in both America and England. Her sometime s savage style, her unerring ability to touch our guilts and fears, and her penetrating, perfectly controlled style were never more marvellously employed than in this superb book.