The Cazalet Chronicles

"She draws from her own family story. It’s all true to life. She was born in the 1920s to a family that was affluent and well-connected, and totally, totally unhappy. Her father and his brother were the directors of the family timber firm. Her mother was a retired dancer, who retired too young. There’s all that sort of stuff. But she chose to do it in fiction, because I think that allows you to do so much that you would struggle to do to the same effect in a more conventional memoir. In Ginzburg’s introduction to Family Lexicon , she makes a point of saying: “Everything here is real. There is no fiction here. And yet, I want you to read it as a novel.” Because people make fewer, or different, demands of novels. They read it with different eyes, and novels give us different kinds of truth. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In The Cazalet Chronicles , part of the way Howard can do that is by really developing the characters, giving us multiple sides and levels. In a memoir, if the author is talking about someone else, it’s usually about what that other person did to them; how things looked from where they were sitting, figuratively speaking. Whereas with the novel, those other people can talk for themselves. And that makes for a much more lifelike experience, I think. Howard said novels were for showing people what other people are like. The dialogue in these books is incredible. Especially the children, she writes children’s dialogue so acutely, so well. But again, it’s the details, like Ginzburg. How people eat: whether someone passes the gravy or just pours it all onto their own plate. That can be as clear an indication of character as whether they were fascist or not, or whether they supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policy or not. Exactly. You see how the decisions that another character made years ago filter down. So, think about The Lying Life of Adults : the lies you tell and their legacy. With The Cazalet Chronicles, it’s the afterlife of lies and mistakes, that ripples through lives—their own, and their family members’. In a series of novels, there is opportunity for these things to breathe, to happen as if in real-time. It’s not compressed into a single novel. So you can see the distance between cause and consequence. As a result, it feels that much truer to life. Hilary Mantel described how the book charted the varying and repeating errors of this one family; I think that’s a good way to describe it. Because when you read them as a whole, it’s like a musical composition that has its own rhythm. These impulses and decisions just happen again and again and again, in different forms. There’s an overarching pattern. Maria Stepanova, who we’re also going to talk about today, talks about trying to discern the ‘oval’ of a life. And you can try to do that for an individual, but you can also do that for a family. As you said, you’re looking to see characters in the round. By doing it across time, it’s a bigger round with many more moving parts. It’s there, but it’s hazier. You can stand back and see it for a second, then you look away and it’s gone."