Review of The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski – A comforting and delicious read | imaginary

AAngela Tomaschi’s debut novel is a comforting and delicious read about loyalty and desperation, and a gentle questioning of the nature of progress. Thornwalk’s crumbling stately home is about to become a luxury hotel. The ancestral owners have all died – except for a pair of greedy cousins, of course – and the only person left to mourn is the loyal servant (and perhaps more?) of the old master.

Maximus, the last guardian of the house, guides the reader on a final tour through Thornwalk, the lost souls, lovers and brass buttons of the titular Gilberts: Lydia, the eldest girl, desperate to fall in love; Hugo, the stubborn eldest son; “Poor little Annabelle,” dreams of writing; Quiet fugitive Jeremy. and the unstable actress Rosalind. He takes us, room by room, bauble by bauble, blot after blot (blackcurrant to blood) through 100 years of family life before it is all lost forever.

Inspired by the National Trust’s 2002 purchase of Tyntesfield, a sprawling Gothic mansion outside Bristol acquired just weeks after the death of the reclusive resident baron, Tomaski’s debut is a quarter century in the making. Tyntesfield contains at least 47,154 items indexed. The same might be true of Gilbert’s Notorious, a novel full of objects, centered around objects. The seventy chapters each correspond to an element or the lack of an element. It’s a veritable feast of small things: Monopoly pieces, ammonites, and children’s clothes (never worn). Everything, no matter how broken or old, is precious because of the people who touched it, used it, and left it. When the new owners plan to replace the carpet with an “exact copy,” Maximus laughs: the original, he tells us, “is composed of fifty percent of Gilbert’s DNA…and the shells of fifteen beloved Labradors and a miniature schnauzer with dermatitis.”

The reverent, dryly funny tones of the old family servant never fail Tomaschi: she meticulously ventriloquizes in the voice the reader expects to hear, a kind of relic of the day with horror stripped away. While there’s nothing particularly striking about the character of Maximus, there’s still great skill and finesse in delivering a perfect score for something so familiar. And there’s a lot that’s familiar here: plenty of moments and stories that resonate with other troubled family sagas. The lure of the big house has never left us; The temptation of the great house to decay is still more pressing. The Infamous Gilberts joins the ranks of Joanna Quinn’s The Whalebone Theater and Lisa Evans’ Small Bomb at Dimmerley, and other comforts read with a skeleton in the closet. It’s difficult to write something new in a genre as comfortably crowded as the Victorian sitting room, and Tomasci doesn’t really try: instead, she executes the thing very seriously to set the standard.

Surprise is not the point here; But joy. This, in a very real sense, Impeccable The Book: Meticulously presented like a collector’s dollhouse, it is as balanced and perfect as a museum diorama. Everything was painted and arranged with the same love and care that Maximus had for Thornwalk and Hugo.

As with all great small plates, there’s a slight—perhaps unavoidable—longing to stop and get a McDonald’s on the way home: a longing for something salty, creamy, and filling that pierces its elegant wisps of wisdom. While much of the undeniable happens in The Infamous Gilberts — axes, shelters, escapes, affairs, missing children, missing adults, madness, betrayal, despair — the distant act of the narrator keeps us strangely insulated from anything resembling plot. “I think that will do,” says Maximus, when he feels the danger of showing too much. “You get the general idea.” When terrible things happen, he relays them to us at a safe distance, both in terms of season and time. We are never in danger. It’s hard, in this slow, funny, nostalgic novel, to feel like anyone was ever in danger, even when they die before our eyes.

“A lot could be said,” Maximus says at one point. “But I won’t say that.” The Infamous Gilberts is a debut, and like all debuts it raises the question of what comes next. What will happen when Tomaski allows herself to say the unsayable? What will she write when she directs her keen eye toward precision, for perfect detail, on people, rather than their objects?