Girl from the South

Henry loves Tilly. What's not to love? She's beautiful, elegant, does everything to perfection. Henry has lived with her for the past 10 years. But he won't commit. And Tilly is getting desperate.
Into this picture comes Gillon, a geeky American girl interning in London. Tilly meets her at a party, spills a drink on her and takes her out to dinner by way of compensation. Little does Tilly know this friendless, floundering girl from Charleston, South Carolina, will steal her boyfriend. To find out how this contemporary love triangle pans out, you'll have to read Girl from the South, Joanna Trollope's latest novel.
Girl from the South is a departure for Trollope, a quintessentially British tale bearer whose work falls nicely onto the same subtle shelf as Barbara Pym's and Mary Wesley's. In her latest venture, Trollope takes the action over the Atlantic to Charleston. Trollope's Charleston is a world richer in ritual and convention than England ever thought of being. And Gillon comes from one of the city's most elegant families. Yet the Southern girl fails to drop neatly into the puzzle. At 30, she is still unmarried, childless, not even on the fast track to a high-powered career. Determined to search for her own unique destiny, she seems to have fallen far behind her popular, married sister in the game of life.
However, things are never exactly what they seem on the surface in this intriguing Trollope novel. People who follow all the rules often have their own regrets. Like Tilly, Gillon's sister and grandmother are trapped in a regimen that defines who they are and how they will behave.
To her conventional family, Gillon is a disappointment, but to Henry, she is everything Tilly is not. Where Tilly is brittle and demanding, Gillon is tentative, searching and formidably honest. She may never get her act together, she warns Henry.
"It might take my whole life. I might drive you nuts while I keep thinking just this or just that will do the trick," she says. In exploring the differences between Tilly, Gillon and conventional Southern women, Trollope captures the choice that all modern women make-whether to take the easy path of fulfilling other people's expectations or the harder, more poorly marked trail of deciding what you expect of yourself.

I picked up this novel with delighted anticipation: I love the South [even with all its pecularities], and I am an anglophile. So I was anticipating the best of both worlds! As an added bonus, reviews had led me to belief that Joanna Trollope [a descendent of "the" Trollope] wrote in "elegant prose".
I was disappointed on both counts. Trollope's style was not what I had been led to believe: any style which requires EIGHT commas in a single sentence is plodding, not elegant. In a novel which seems to investigate the allure of home and family, the portion of the novel that is set in England takes place in a rather shakily realised London.
The plot was minimal, the novel resting more on the unfolding of characterizations and relationships. That is fine -- but the unfolding should consist of surprises, and not be too predictable. The characters are familar to us: the Stokes family in Charleston consists of Gillon, a twentysomething who is "searching"; her sister Ashley has always acted the quintessential Southern Belle, but now feels unloved and unable to maintain the facade; her mother Martha, who has rebelled against the Southern Belle tradition by becoming a feminist and aloof to her family; her father Boone, who initially thought he wanted to break out of his environs, but as he ages sinks deep into its comfort. We know these characters, we are familiar with these characters -- but we learn nothing new about them, or about ourselves. The only character I wanted to know more about was Gillon's grandmother, Sarah. Since the plot is minimal, the lack of character development is lethal.
The British side fares somewhat, but not a lot, better. Henry, who comes to the States when Gillon returns home, is supposed to be a catalyst, or at least a reflecive lens, through which the characters see their environment in new way and are transformed. However, Henry is non-critical to the point of being transparent. Tilly, Henry's rejected girlfriend, slowly learns to be less dependent on the idea of marriage to define herself. But still: 'We're supposed to have so much choice, aren't we,' Tilly said. 'We're supposed to have more choice than anyone has ever had, personally or professionally, before. But we still go round, don't we, like hamsters on wheels, doing the same stuff, wanting the same things, dogged by the same doubts and fears.' "
That's how I felt reading this book -- going round and round, like a hamster on a wheel, not getting anywhere.

A real disappointment -- I enjoy Joanna Trollope's books for their contemporary British setting but she should stick to writing about England, not attempt to explore the gracious southern lifestyle in the US which is admittedly foreign even to us Yankees in the north. Note to author: a modern southern woman would probably not say "I shan't..." In the US, those little rubber things on the ends of baby bottles are called "nipples" not "teats." A woman suffers from post-partum depression,not "post-natal depression." Aside from the cross-cultural gaffes, this book bounced all over from character to (barely tangential) character like silly putty. A sad attempt.

I wanted to like this book. I have loved books set in England as well as so many set in the south. This dark little tale captured the charm of neither.
The charachters- especially the "heroine" Gillon are all shallow and nasty individuals. Gillon is cold and mean to friends and family alike! The dialogue seemed to consist of people saying "what" or "pardon" to each other. There was no epiphany or growth- simply whining....
There are so many great novels set in England- reread Bridget Jones if you cannot find something else! As for South Carolina- try D.B. Frank's Sullivan's ISland. And SKIP Girl from the South

While the book was well-written, I found myself interested in the stories that were largely untold. Henry was a jerk and Gillon too self-absorbed and shallow. What about Ashley's story? What about Grandma Sarah's story? There was much more to tell that we were given a glimpse of before Trollope jutted off into the main plot line (that I wasn't much interested in, anyway).
I enjoyed her style of writing. The dialogue was great. Just felt it could have been a better book. I am definitely going to try some of Trollope's other books before "writing" her off!

Trollope (yes, an Anthony relative), writer of edgy, witty and penetrating novels of domestic life, often shakes up the delicate and complex balance of family relationships by throwing a spanner into the mix, an outsider who changes perspective, alters perceptions. In "The Men and the Girls" it's an elderly spinster; in "Next of Kin" it's a young free spirit; in her latest, "Girl from the South," it's a girl on one side of the intercontinental pond and a boy on the other.
Though her themes are familiar, English Trollope's focus on a traditional American family of the deep South is a definite departure and, mostly, an interesting, thought-provoking change.
Gillon Stokes, a daughter of the old South of Charleston, South Carolina, defies the expectations of her close-knit family in a series of ineffectual moves and new beginnings. She's not sure what she wants, just that it isn't what Charleston has to offer. As she explains to her boss in a small Charleston museum:
" 'I want to know,' she said. 'I want to find something or someone that my mind just looks at and says, "Yes." No messing.'....'Books used to do it. I thought I'd found the Holy Grail with almost anything I read. But it doesn't seem to work now. I question too much.'
'You know too much,' Paul said. 'That's what happens when you get older.'
Paul has arranged a job for Gillon in London. She goes reluctantly, but is soon taken up by Tilly, an arts magazine editor in a stalled relationship with Henry, a wildlife photographer unwilling to commit. Tilly and Henry's circle of young Londoners are footloose, adrift as Tilly sees it, fearful that they will all still be behaving as young singles in their dotage. But Gillon begins to gain a sense of belonging and happiness. " 'It might be,' she told Tilly with some diffidence, 'because I don't feel I'm letting anyone down.' "
But Gillon goes home to be with her sister for her first baby and, on a whim, invites disgruntled Henry (also looking for some undefined meaning in his life) to see South Carolina. To her surprise and discomfort, he turns up and is captivated by her family.
The first half of the novel explores the rootless, "is that all there is?" feeling of late youth with urbanity and wit. ("He eyed Tilly up and down in the assessing way so peculiarly arrogant in plain men.") The second half delves more deeply into family dynamics and relationships in crisis with mixed results.
Oddly, Trollope contrasts the long tradition of family and community ties in Charleston with an unrooted, rather bohemian community in London. None of the young Londoners have close family though Gillon's preoccupations stir familial longings in Tilly and even Henry. Devastated by Henry's defection, Tilly turns to the aloof, near-stranger of a mother who left her and her father to go off with another man, a woman whose mistakes have made her wiser, though no different at the core.
But Trollope herself seems captivated by Southern ideas of family with its strong reliance on rules and expectations. Not that she romanticizes it, at least not much. Her eye is too sharp for that and her view of humanity too clear. All of Trollope's characters have flaws, from Gillon's warm and traditional Southern grandmother with her dark secret and regrets, to Gillon's psychologist mother, wise and understanding with her patients and defiantly undomestic and aloof at home, to Gillon herself, a mass of contradictions all bundled up in negativity and yearning.
These southerners sometimes fall into mildly disconcerting Briticisms but overall it's a refreshing exploration of American family and the Charleston attempt to absorb and subsume individual human flaws in a structure of expectation, manners and tradition. Reading it, you get a sense of Trollope, like Henry, bringing an outsider's fresh perspective to bear on a close study of human behavior as cultivated in Charleston.
Not that she neglects her London characters. The settings alternate as Tilly adjusts to abandonment, then (as she sees it) betrayal, by nurturing a new relationship with her mother - in parallel with three Charleston generations of mothers and daughters.
Trollope is, as ever, subtle, witty and perceptive. Gillon, however, is one of her more tiresome characters. As the protagonist she is likable enough, but too whiny. A character who gets just about everything she wants and is never satisfied. But American Trollope fans will enjoy her take on American family, and the writing is as observant, graceful and eloquent as always.

This novel has none of the depth of previous Trollope novels. This story is more suited to the "Caroline Harvey" romance line. The characters are shallow, the writing stilted, and the plot thin. There are many breaks in the storyline and they never seem to be tied together. This is the first Trollope book that I have been able to put down. In fact, it may stay down without the last third ever being finished.