The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Material conditions are the most satisfying part of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles. Through five chunky novels—The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change—she follows the lives of a sprawling, well-to-do English clan of timber merchants between 1937 and the late 1950s via the kaleidoscopic, rotating perspective of the Cazalets and their children, friends, servants, and lovers—even a pet rat gets a turn telling the story near the end. But what captivated me were the details too often tagged as incidental—everything to do with living life every day. A discussion of chamber pots and who gets stuck with the chipped one; darned socks and Jeyes cleaning fluid and stained bathtubs; the masses of food the family's cook prepares (pounds and pounds of pastry); the pervasive lack of central heating; margarine on toast instead of butter. The eternal rituals of bathtimes and bedtimes and the recurring problem of who is watching the children and how to take care of older folks. Over time, daughters grow up to be folded into an endless cycle of caretaking, even as the family's fortunes drastically change. The cash reserves dwindle, and servants become a things of the past. Howard is brilliant at showing the way awareness of money creeps in on people who never had to think about it and how it never leaves the thoughts of the poorer folks in their midst, like the aging governess Miss Milliment (a marvelous character, maybe the best of all). These books get tagged as comfort reads, and Howard does provide a degree of explanation and completeness. The characters feel real, but there is very little of reality's murky ambiguities. Everything everyone does is explained. But her close attention to conditions of her characters' lives and her elevation of voices on the margins of the Cazalets' privileged world feel closer to something radical.

(This series deserves better cover--all of the English language editions underwhelm!)