Under Analysis, a Family Sorts Through the Past

For a novel that places a house in its title and at its center, it seems all too fitting to discover that Esther Freud’s “Summer at Gaglow” stands on such solid architectural ground. Architecture, in this case, speaks to the book’s structure: Interleaving two separate narratives, Freud conveys the story in odd-numbered chapters of the Belgards, a German Jewish family who spend several pivotal summers at Gaglow, their country home in eastern Germany, during World War I; in even-numbered chapters, she presents the life of one of their descendants, Sarah Linder, a 27-year-old English actress whose interest in her family’s history awakens when she learns that with the Berlin Wall’s dismantling her father may have inherited several pieces of property, Gaglow among them.

The great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and the daughter of the painter Lucien Freud, Esther Freud clearly knows a thing or two about the nature of legacies. She is the author of two previous novels, the autobiographical “Hideous Kinky,” which is told in the voice of a 5-year-old female narrator, and “Peerless Flats,” a coming-of-age story set in London in the 1970s.

Yet while there are certain identifiable autobiographical correlations in “Summer at Gaglow”--Sarah, like the author, is an actress, and her father, Michael, is a painter--Freud’s attention feels more sharply concentrated on the period chapters, which are alive with intricate family alliances and conflicts and are advanced by a war-driven plot. The contemporary chapters, which rely on the unfolding of information about Gaglow, Sarah’s sitting as a model for one of her father’s canvases and her baby’s birth, feel somewhat underdeveloped by comparison.

One of the virtues of “Summer at Gaglow” is the lack of sentimentality with which it regards the past. The Belgards are headed by Wolf, a prosperous grain trader, and his wife, Marianna, whose eccentricities include a penchant for drinking beer and smoking cigars. Their children are Emanuel, who is celebrating his 21st birthday as the book opens and Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in Sarajevo (an event that soon sends him into the army), and three daughters: Bina, Martha and Eva, the youngest, who will eventually become Sarah’s grandmother.

Although the Belgard girls wear white muslin dresses and picnic by waterfalls, neither they nor the strange, atmospheric Gaglow--a stone house with 14 bedrooms, a circular hall and tapestries hanging over the doors--are given a sepia-toned, “Masterpiece Theatre”-like treatment. Partly, this is because of the absence of ornament in Freud’s writing, and partly it is a result of the other key influence on the girls’ life, their governess, Fraulein Schulze, or “Schu,” as the girls call her. Schu is the alternate mother to Marianna, who “sting[s] with the sight of her children’s growing adoration” for the governess. Schu poisons the girls’ feelings about their mother, training them to see her as vulgar and unrefined, someone who has “got far above herself,” as Bina puts it.

Schu is but one snake in the Gaglow garden. Another is the way the house came to the Belgards: After buying four seasons’ worth of grain on credit, its former owner, gave it to Wolf to erase his debt. Accepting the surrounding land causes Wolf some concern, which Marianna dismisses by asking, rhetorically, “ ‘We should say no because we are Jews?’ ” This sense of the Belgards not quite belonging to Germany is subtly but firmly laid in and deepens as the war progresses. Wolf is asked by the kaiser to supply grain to the army; he does so reluctantly, refusing to make any profit from the transaction. He sees it as “fattening [Germany’s sons] up for slaughter,” a fact that haunts him to the point that he withdraws from his work, his family and, eventually, his life.

Freud’s contemporary narrative imparts a haunting quality to the period chapters as the reader learns bits and pieces of the Belgards’ eventual fate (some incorrect, as is typical of family stories handed down across generations) and then returns to the past to observe the characters innocently playing out their lives. The strongest writing emerges in Freud’s portrayal of the effects of the war on the family: their gradual impoverishment, their anxiety about Emanuel’s experience being taken as a prisoner of war, which is conveyed in his compelling diary entries and is linked to Schu’s mysterious disappearance.

While this and other factual questions are resolved by the conclusion, the reader is left with an abiding curiosity about Sarah’s preoccupation with her heritage and her inner life. “Summer at Gaglow” is an uneven book, but at its best it offers a vivid dose of time travel and manages to evoke a family’s past with precise and compassionately reached truths.