Sometimes it’s odd the way writers get pigeonholed. Browsing the list of novels by Joanna Trollope the other day on Amazon.com, I was startled to find so many reader/reviewers, professed admirers of her work, categorizing it as “vacation reading.” Maybe it depends on how they spend their vacations, but Trollope’s work has always seemed to me deeper and more serious than what most of us take along to while away the time at the beach or on a cruise.
Yes, Trollope writes almost exclusively about domestic life, which pushes familiar buttons for all of us; she views her characters with a clear but kind and forgiving eye; and mothers and daughters are of particular interest to her. Yes, too, doubtless through no fault of her own, the cover illustrations on American editions of her books often seem designed to appeal to women — the cover of “Daughters-in-Law” shows a mother and daughter looking out at the sea — but that doesn’t mean one should file her away as “a woman’s writer.” She doesn’t belong in that pigeonhole any more than do other British writers with whom she is roughly contemporaneous: Fay Weldon (a professed admirer of her work), Isabel Colegate, Penelope Lively, Anita Brookner et al.
"Daughters-in-Law: A Novel" by Joanna Trollope (319 pp. Paperback, $14.99)
“Daughters-in-Law” is the sixth of Trollope’s novels that I have reviewed — she has published 16 — and I’ve had nothing but praise for all of them, as well as for those that I’ve read but not reviewed. Inasmuch as I am neither a woman nor a devotee of “women’s novels,” this suggests — to me if to no one else — that her appeal is broader than that category and that her depictions of family life reach, at their keenest, genuine universality. Her eye may be kind and forgiving, but she cuts no one any slack, and the experiences her characters undergo often are painful and difficult, with repercussions that alter their lives, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. In other words, life treats them just the way it treats us, one of many reasons why it is so easy to identify and sympathize with them.
Interconnections and interactions among generations are often central to Trollope’s novels, never more so than in “Daughters-in-Law,” as indeed the title implies. Though every member of the Brinkley family takes center stage at one moment or another, there is no central character per se, unless that distinction belongs to the family itself, “all of them being so close and being so involved with each other,” as Sigrid, one of the daughters-in-law, puts it, and not happily. The elders of the family, Anthony and Rachel Brinkley, presumably in their 60s, have produced three sons, now ranging in age from the late 20s to the late 30s. All of them are married — Luke, the youngest, marries Charlotte as the novel begins — and two of them have children: Edward, “the responsible eldest son of the family, the one who had to listen on the phone when Granny rang up with a problem,” and Sigrid have Mariella, 8 years old; and Ralph and Petra have Kit and Barney, 3 and “still not walking.”
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