Another day, another Pym's Oates

An Academic Question by Barbara Pym (Macmillan, £9.95). Thanks to Hazel Holt, friend and literary executor of Barbara Pym, we have another posthumous novel to enjoy.
Even after seven years of rejection, Miss Pym continued writing and An Academic Question was re-written, in an attempt to bring her work into line with the permissiveness of the Seventies when her cosy spinsters and curates found little favour with trendy publishers.
The two versions have been lovingly fused by Hazel Holt and the result, though far from permissive or "swinging", is a refreshing novel in the best Pym tradition of wry humour and mild eccentricity. Set in a West Country university, the story is told by Caroline, an "excellent woman" who struggles to fill her role as wife of a rising young academic in the very closed-shop atmosphere of the university.
Caroline is naive, self-critical and vaguely discontented with her life, but acutely observant of unscrupulous academic rivalries. The intellectual subterfuges and wranges form the theme of the novel, but the fringe characters, with their brilliantly observed gossip and backchat, give us the icing on the cake. Subtitles of academic protocol and an underlying gentle morality make this a pleasing, very funny, book.
Marys: A Life by Joyce Carol Oates (Jonathan Cape, £10.95). Every private soldier is said to have a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack, and no doubt every poor-white American girl has the making of a liberated woman artist and intellectual. But this "life" is more than a Tags-to-riches story. It is a deepfelt, almost heroic, account of Marya, a virtual orphan, brought up in her uncle's house where she begins to realise that she is a misfit -a realisation
which never leaves her.
Marya's world expands through literature where her greed for learning and experience brings her the kind of special recognition which shapes her relationships and her very separate life. The story is told episodically with strong personalities dominating each stage of the girl's life.