'The Bookshop': A Caustic Tale of Clashing Sensibilities Gets A Too-Gentle Treatment
To make Penelope Fitzgerald's astringent novel more broadly palatable, adapter Isabel Coixet softens it nearly beyond recognition. Fitzgerald fans, be warned: The result is marketable but mealy.
In 1978, embarking on a career at the ripe age of 58 that would earn her a raft of literary prizes, the British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald published a wonderfully tragicomic tale, short-listed for the Booker prize, about a 1950s middle-aged war widow who wakes up one day and decides to open a bookstore in her fog-bound East Anglian fishing village. 's plot turns on all the locals who mobilize to thwart
