Author Keeps Characters’ Motivations Shrouded in Secrecy

Caro Meredith never quite fit in. A rootless Californian, a self-described “nomad,” she married an English dairy farmer out of her hunger for permanence but kept subtly aloof from her husband, Robin, and his family. All the more surprising, then, that Caro’s death from a brain tumor should have such an impact on the Merediths, sending out shock waves to disrupt every part of their world.

Robin loved Caro but felt she didn’t love him back. The evidence: She kept her infertility a secret until long after their wedding. She seduced their adopted daughter Judy into siding with her “progressive” ideas and rejecting Robin’s stodgy Midlands ways.

Robin’s brother Joe loved Caro, or at least saw in her American ease an expression of freedom he longed for. Joe farms the neighboring property, where his and Robin’s parents live along with his wife and children. Burdened by debt and depression, Joe kills himself soon after Caro’s funeral, throwing the family into even greater turmoil.

Nobody in Joanna Trollope’s latest novel is exempt from grief, the wrenching changes it imposes and the unexpected consolations life brings in its wake. Indeed, the protagonist of “Next of Kin” isn’t so much any human character as the process of grieving itself, with its parallels to farming--the cutting down, the lying fallow, the sowing of new seed.

In Robin’s case, consolation comes from another outsider. Judy’s trendy London flat mate Zoe, a photographer with dyed hair and flamboyant jewelry, comes to visit and sees him as Judy never could--as a kind man who has had a hard time. Half Robin’s age, Zoe moves in with him, sending out more shock waves: It’s a scandal, and nobody is angrier about it than Judy.

Zoe, with her courage, her calm, her precocious wisdom (“Don’t always be right. Please,” Judy implores her toward the end), is one of the misty areas in a picture that Trollope otherwise presents with a reassuring solidity of physical and psychological detail. We know that Zoe’s father abandoned her and that she, like Caro, longs for permanence. What we never quite get a fix on is why she should be sexually drawn to a middle-aged farmer in dung-spattered overalls.

Caro, too, is misty. In a flashback, Trollope describes her life up to the moment when Robin proposes marriage, then abandons her point of view. We never learn--despite the influence these attitudes had on her family--why she fell out of love or why she was “unable to settle” in England despite living there for 20 years.

The biggest mystery, perhaps, is Joe. We enter his mind briefly as he stands in Caro’s bedroom after her funeral. His money worries are mentioned. But what exactly Caro meant to him and what are the sources of his despair--when to his parents and neighbors he has always been a golden boy--remain elusive.

Trollope (“The Rector’s Wife,” “A Spanish Lover,” “Marrying the Mistress”) is a skilled and veteran chronicler of contemporary English middle-class life. In “Next of Kin,” she makes convincing characters out of everyone from Robin’s hired herdsman to his 3-year-old nephew, who mourns Joe with magical thinking, thumb-sucking and a stuffed seal.

She describes the farming life--a ceaseless struggle against weather, disease, mishap and, latterly, environmental regulation--with authority.

Therefore, we think, the misty areas in the story must be misty by design. People die and take their secrets with them, Trollope seems to be saying, but her choice of omniscient narration works against this: She could tell us if she chose. All secrets are accessible, and withholding the ones she does--in favor of lengthy passages about slurry and silage and tractors--seems perverse.