Inheritance

July 1, 2019
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.

July 15, 2019
The web of unhappiness ensnaring the children of an upper-class English family fascinates a restless American visitor. Chilly, and peopled by a cast of more or less damaged characters, Toynton's (The Oriental Wife, 2011, etc.) third novel spins a downbeat tale exploring the destructive spiral of the Digby family, whose idyllic Devon home is also the heart of its suffering. The house is presided over by matriarch and famous scientist Helena, whose domineering, narcissistic personality has extended a profound influence over her three children. This history is uncovered slowly by an outsider, widowed American Annie Devereaux, who has fled New York after her husband's sudden death. An unexpected encounter on a London street with Helena's son, Julian, leads to a relationship that morphs from sex and sharing into withering cruelty, apparently Julian's familiar pattern. But before the relationship founders, Annie is introduced to Julian's sister Isabel, who offers another facet of the family--beautiful, intellectual, and wounded. There's also a third sibling, math prodigy Sasha, whose mental illness is at times an effective weapon against her selfishly controlling mother. Annie, with her Anglophilia and romantic view of Devon, courtesy of her long-absent father, is magnetized by both Isabel and her home. The text is sprinkled with references to Brideshead Revisited, Toynton's acknowledgement of some parallels between the two stories. But she pulls her own narrative westward, setting up contrasts between Britain and the U.S. and problematical single-family homes on either side of the Atlantic. It's a finely phrased and observed piece of writing but doesn't fully characterize its narrator nor break the doomed family out of the mold. Even though the Digby secrets are exposed and Annie moves on to yet another (imperfect) relationship, little emerges in the way of resolution. A small, brittle, not entirely focused story of class and lost illusions.

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Starred review from August 1, 2019

After the unexpected death of her young husband, American Annie Devereaux flies away to England, hoping to find an escape that fulfills her romantic dreams of the country. She entangles herself with new friend Julian and his family, for which the word dysfunction is an understatement. Through Julian and his sisters, Annie meets their imperious mother, famous geneticist Helena Digby, constantly scheming and manipulating her children so they achieve the perfection she demands from their genetic inheritance. Of course, no one meets her expectations, and tragedy ensues. VERDICT A wordsmith of the highest order, Toynton (Jackson Pollock) weaves a deeply cinematic story. Book discussion groups will revel in this family's saga.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2019
Annie Devereaux, living in 1990s St. Paul, Minnesota, happens upon a story in an old Vogue about an English country house and the highborn woman who lived there. As with Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, Annie's memories are awakened. It's 1986, and Annie, then a thirtysomething American widow lugging a suitcase of psychological damage, seeks the idyllic vision of pastoral England that her father, a WWII veteran, entranced her with as a child before he disappeared forever. With rich literary allusions, Toynton, (The Oriental Wife, 2011) delivers a classic story set in Thatcher's England, where materialism scuppers religion. Coming to England seeking redemption, Annie becomes enmeshed in the lives of three siblings and their controlling mother, members of an eccentric, tragic English family. The English countryside is indeed a Garden of Eden, but behind the manor door is the poisoned fruit of human hands. Back in America, Annie's clouds of glory are gone, but with a hard-won sense of reality, she will plant a climbing rose that promises summer-long blooms. Themes of parental legacy, lost innocence, the impermanence of life, DNA versus nurture, and illusion versus reality wrap vine-like around evocative locales and vivid characters to create a knotty story ripe for discussion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)