Reading Novels of the Domestic Drama

Because I've been doing so much handwork in the past few months, my novel reading has suffered. Instead, when I wasn't gardening or--more lately--involved in family activities associated with our daughter's living with us for the summer, I would sit down in front of my television with the latest handwork project and access Netflix in order to watch something that wouldn't be so engrossing as to interfere with the needle work. And so I have watched all of the old Adam Dagleish mysteries from the 1990s, adaptations of the P.D. James mystery novels; most episodes of the sci-fi series Stargate Atlantis; all of the British Rosemary and Thyme mysteries; and now, abandoning myself to the nostalgia of childhood, the Mission: Impossible episodes of the 1960s and 1970s.  Occasionally, I think that I should listen to language tapes instead when I'm doing handwork, for then I would be learning something, but the boyish face of Colonel Shepherd of Stargate Atlantis or Roy Marsden's melancholy Adam Dagleish or the lovely English gardens highlighted in Rosemary and Thyme make me abandon my more intellectual aspirations. Could I stitch as well while repeating Spanish phrases?

This week, however, putting handwork aside, I indulged in a novel by one of my favorite contemporary British novelists, Joanna Trollope, who ranks up there with my other favorite British novelists, Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, and Penelope Lively. I gulped down the novel in one day, immersed in the human experience that Trollope creates so believably in her novels. Novels written by women authors that deal with domesticity and human relationships underwhelm many people. Charlotte Bronte said of Jane Austen's fiction: "There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound." Mark Twain had this to say: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig [Jane Austen] up and beat her over the head with her own shin-bone."

But I love a finely written novel that delineates the human heart in all its strength and weaknesses without resorting to violence or over-dramatization. I love novelists who realize that we reveal ourselves more thoroughly in everyday experiences, when we least think we're on display to the world.

Anthony Trollope, a distant relative of Joanna Trollope's, had this to say about Jane Austen:

Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with uncommon accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good;.--and certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly, I know of no novelist who has beaten her.

Anthony Trollope, if living today, would perhaps write something similar about the novels of Joanna Trollope, which are often called "domestic dramas" because they deal with the everyday drama of marriage, lovers, divorce, children, aging parents, aging lovers. Another term that has been used to describe these kinds of novels is "Aga saga." According to Wikipedia the "Aga saga is a sub-genre of the family saga of literature. The genre is named for the AGA cooker, a type of stored-heat oven that came to be popular in medium to large country houses in the UK after its introduction in 1929. It refers primarily to fictional family sagas dealing with British middle-class country or village life." Obviously, the phrase has a condescending ring to it.

Joanna Trollope describes in an interview some of the criticism of her writing:

“I am often criticised for being rather accessible. . . . And my reply to that is I think Mozart and the Parthenon are quite accessible, too, though perhaps in another league. . . . There was one review that said 'you could read this book in a day’, as if that was a bad thing. I mean these books to be easy to read, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t thought-provoking.

But, as Fay Weldon says, "She can be as subtle as Austen, as sharp as Bronte. Trollope’s brilliant."

In The Men and the Girls, the Joanna Trollope novel that I finished today, two couples that are the main characters are men and women with a wide gap between their ages; the men are in their late fifties or early sixties, their younger partners in their thirties and forties. The novel deals with the issues this discrepancy in age causes. At the beginning of the novel, an accident causes a young woman to re-examine her life, and she is convinced she must leave the much older man with whom she and her young daughter have been happily living for eight years. In a conversation before she leaves, the man, very kindly, asks," Are you afraid you'll have to look after me?"

The young woman eventually responds, "I'm afraid of you," to which the man wisely replies: "You're afraid of yourself...You see in me what you will become and you're afraid of that."

Who among us hasn't had that fear as we observed those older than us? I see that fear in my daughter's eyes, as she grapples with deciding on college courses and emphasis of studies that may affect the choices she can make later in life. At work, she has seen what bureaucracy can do to a person, how it can wear one down, destroying ambition, dampening enthusiasm, encouraging mediocrity. At home, she sees the disappointments and sorrows I and her father have dealt with, and while we have survived, we bear the scars of those battles, a cynicism or melancholy that we cannot entirely escape, despite our best intentions. This is a difference between fifty-four and twenty.

Toward the end of the novel, one of the characters in Trollope's novel The Men and the Girls, a young wife to a television star who is past his prime, lies in bed thinking:

She...had lain awake for a long time thinking...that there were few things she could think of at that moment that were as desolate as plain old disappointment . . . [N]obody ever gives disappointment the credit of being a prime force behind wayward behavior. But it is. Disappointment is what's the matter with most of us...

It's that kind of insight I so appreciate in the novels of Joanna Trollope, that, and the believable characters that come to life in her novels.