Inheritance

The tepid latest from Toynton (The Oriental Wife) is a neo-Jamesian exploration of old-world versus new-world manners and morals as a young American woman in 1986 becomes obsessed with a tragedy-prone English family. After Annie Devereaux’s husband dies, she travels from New York to London, where she meets the charming Julian Digby, who becomes her lover. He introduces her to his two sisters, Isabel, an author and single mother, and Sasha, who suffers from mental illness, and to the family matriarch, Helena, a famous geneticist with an imperious manner. After the affair with Julian abruptly ends, Annie begins a friendship with the emotionally fragile Isabel. Annie’s writing career flourishes, and she finds a new love in Jack, an academic. But she is constantly drawn back to the Digbys, whose secrets lead to an inevitable tragedy. Like a distaff Nick Guest in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty or Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (which receives mention here), Annie is the classic outsider obsessed with a seemingly glamorous family. But the story is made of too many competing story elements that don’t dramatically cohere. In the end, Toynton takes a number of smartly drawn characters and leaves them stranded in an enervated narrative. [em](Sept.) [/em]