When you live in a place long enough, it just happens that you leave your mark on the place, just as much as its shape stamps itself on your memories from that era of your life. It’s a truth I’ve been thinking about as my family and I have been cleaning out the decades-long home of a deceased relative, where I and other people in the family also lived for a time. In Angela Tomaski’s debut novel The Infamous Gilberts, those little traces are fodder for a rich and rewarding piece of fiction.
As a hotelier prepares to assume and renovate Thornwalk, generations-long home of the Gilbert family, a friend takes us on a tour of the English manor’s idiosyncrasies, and of the final generation to hold it. From Lydia’s near-fling with her tutor in the 1920s to the final days of the final living child in the early 2000s, everything from the covers of a torn-out journal to a long-forgotten cane sparks a story about how the five children—Lydia, Hugo, Annabel, Jeremy, and Rosalind—grow together and apart (and sometimes together again). There’s some fun and a lot of disappointment. Some laughter and a lot of anger. There are wars and journeys and stories told enough times that they start sounding true. And amid it all, this fictional family begins to feel very real.
The Infamous Gilberts is a slim novel, just over 250 pages. Yet each of the vignette-like chapters reveals another aspect of a character or another facet of a relationship that in turns damns and redeems them as characters. Who’s the worst of the so-called “Infamous Gilberts”? Is it Hugo, the oldest and longest-dwelling tenant at Thornwalk, whose heroics during his youth and WWII may or may not make up for the my-way-or-the-highway thinking that ultimately and justifiably alienates most everyone around him? Is it Lydia, the oldest, who was pressured into a marriage with a much-older man and made her passive-aggressive (and maybe subconscious) misery her whole personality? Or it Rosalind, the spoiled youngest child who grows into a movie starlet and then a convict?
Annabel and Jeremy are hard to condemn, though for different reasons. Jeremy, feeling cast out of Thornwalk, instead roams the world. Annabel, literally cast out of Thornwalk and widely considered to be figuratively out of her mind, haunts its grounds, and then its halls, and is perhaps the sanest of them all, in a sense.
Yet as much as those brief and spoiler-flirting descriptions cast the characters into rigid roles, few people are so easy to define, and Tomaski avoids doing so with her characters. Though Hugo overreacts and Lydia schemes and Rosalind pouts, they each have turns as the sympathetic hero of the story. More than anything else, they are deeply loved by the family, even the same family they sometimes lash out at.
Late in the book, the narrator records Annabel talking to herself, as if in an interview. “I wanted them all to be remembered,” she says aloud. “I wanted it all to count for something.” Hugo, too, worries that whoever takes on Thornwalk after he passes won’t understand what the house, the estate, the family means. Talking about the fact that dust is partly made up of shed bits of skin and such, he says, “I find it comforting. They are still here, on the lampshades and on the light switches […] But what will happen to them when I am gone? People are so keen on dusting these days.”
A dent in the table or a bit of ash in the fireplace or a burned bit of carpet. A beloved pet’s gravestone. The smudges on a window. The cracked soap in a bathroom and a little tuft of wool. The little bits of life, the little traces of us. The Gilberts and Thornwalk are fictional, but the equivalents in our own homes and families and lives aren’t. These bits and bobbles, these trinkets and signs of wear that mean nothing to anyone else and might not even mean a thing to ourselves but nevertheless bear aching witness to, well, life. And unfolding as this life of the Gilbert family does for us, we are helpless to stop, or even blunt, it.
We can’t make them smarter, or give them perspective, or make them appreciate what joy there is before it’s taken or fizzles. But we can witness that life, and give a little more thought to the often-forgotten corollaries that surround us.
Ring Reads 