Girl From the South, by Joanna Trollope. Viking. 294 pages. $24.95.
What is that Sixties-era slogan? "If you love someone, let them go?" Joanna Trollope, the popular British author, seems to have taken this and other soppy maxims -- such as "Love means never having to say you're sorry" -- as her guideposts in writing a thin, ultimately unsatisfying novel of modern romance.
To an American reader in particular, much of the book rings false, centering as it does on a young woman from Charleston, S.C., who battles the pressures of her family and the conventions of Southern femininity to try and find her way in life. All nuance is lost as Trollope draws a flat, cliched portrait of a Southern clan: good-ole-boy father and son; starchy, traditional grandmother; and a goody-two-shoes daughter who is married and a mother in her 20s.
Gillon Stokes is the odd duck, the daughter who shows no sign of either finding a husband or settling on a career. And she has a mop of curly hair, a sign of wild unconventionality in Trollope's superficial take on the South. But the problem for Gillon as the novel begins is that she doesn't appreciate herself -- she doesn't glory in her unorthodoxy and yet she doesn't see the up side of coming from a family rooted in place and tradition. Trollope intends to remedy her of both misapprehensions, while teaching some other uppity characters a lesson.
Oddly enough, a much older city, London, is cast as the opposite of Charleston, and portrayed as a heartless, modern metropolis populated by rootless young people. When Gillon moves to London in a rather random effort to find herself, she meets up with Tilly, who would seem to have so much more than she: a live-in boyfriend and steady employment as a magazine editor. The two women become friends, and Tilly introduces Gillon to Henry, her photographer boyfriend.
In Trollope's world you don't earn the right to be happy unless you salute some universal truths, like the letting go part of love (see above). And Tilly, despite having manageable hair and a determined disposition doesn't see that, and makes the fatal error of putting pressure on Henry to commit to her. Why, she frets, does he seem in the end ambivalent about their relationship? He can't tell her, although he suspects it has something to do with his parents' divorce, and his father decamping to Australia.
Gillon wanders back to Charleston in her typically aimless way, but before she goes casually invites Henry to come and visit. He takes her up on it -- much to her surprise. In Charleston, he falls in love with her city and her family. Gillon starts to see both through his eyes.
Meanwhile, Henry has a galvanizing effect on other members of the Stokes family. The too-perfect-to-be real sister falls for him, and Gillon's brother is inspired by him. Henry himself finds new energy for his career, and after gently discouraging the sister, falls in love with Gillon.
By this time, via some alchemic process invisible to the reader, Gillon grasps her true worth, and despite her guilt about her erstwhile friend Tilly, accepts Henry's love. Wise woman that she is, she doesn't try to cage him in. In fact, at the end of the novel, she's off to take a dream job in another state, and she and Henry will see how their relationship develops.
Trollope fancies herself a preacher of emotional wisdom, but this reader, at least, had no patience for her gospel pounding.
Clare McHugh, founding editor of the men's magazine Maxim is now an editor-at-large at Time Inc. She has served as editor-in-chief of New Woman and executive editor of Marie Claire.