Book Review: Habits of the House by Fay Weldon

Habits of the House (Love and Inheritance #1)
By Fay Weldon

Published by St. Martin’s and Sold by Macmillan, 2013
Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's
Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

Habits of the House is the first of Weldon’s trilogy set at the turn of the twentieth century.  It concerns the plight of the Hedleigh family, including the Earl of Dilberne, his wife Isobel, and their two children, Rosina and Arthur.  In the opening chapter, we learn that family is deeply in debt and that their South African gold mine has been flooded in the Boer War.  Most of the plot concerns the family’s attempt to become financially solvent, and the primary method of recovering their wealth involves Arthur’s marriage to Minnie O’Brian, an American heiress of questionable reputation.  Points of view vary, but we see the Dilberne story primarily through the eyes of Arthur, Minnie, Isobel, and Isobel’s maid Grace, with occasional forays into the minds of the Earl, Rosina, and other servants.

Because it was published at the height of Downton Abbey’s popularity and tells the story of English aristocrats and their servants, comparisons to the TV show are inevitable, and some reviewers have described Weldon’s novel as a Downton knockoff.  I’ll not deny that Weldon capitalized on Downton’s popularity with the timing of this release, but given that she wrote the pilot of Downton’s predecessor Upstairs, Downstairs it’s hard to say she “copied” Downton.

Habits of the House is a quick, enjoyable read.  It’s not psychologically dense; while we get a sense of why they characters act the way they do, the narrative often skims the surface of characters’ feelings and motivations, and Weldon relies to an extent on familiar types.  That is, the Earl is a wastrel aristocrat, and his son is a wastrel aristocrat in the making.  Rosina is a spinster-reformer, too intent on her various causes for her family’s liking.  There’s even an upstart Jewish lawyer on whom the Earl is far too dependent, though Weldon fortunately does not indulge in much stereotyping of Jewish characters.

It probably goes without saying that Weldon is a good writer (she’s been wildly successful for quite some time).  Her prose never bugs, and the pacing of the story is good.  That said, for the first half or so, I found this book rather hard to get in to. The surface-skimming nature of the narrative, alongside Weldon’s use of types, made it difficult to care about the characters.  By the end, though, I wanted to know what happened to Arthur and Minnie, and I had come to care for Minnie—she and her mother might be the only characters in the story allowed psychological complexity.  I’m also curious about Rosina’s fate and Grace’s.  For these reasons, I added the second book in the trilogy to my Wish List, though reading it isn’t really a priority, I’ll admit.