"For such a little girl, you know, you're neurotic."

Portia is 16. (It's the 1930s.) Her parents have died, and she's been sent to live with her much older half-brother and his cold and stylish wife in London for a year. It's awkward. The wife's volatile and ambitious admirer flirts with Portia a bit, Portia falls in love as only a girlish teenager can do. You know this can't end well, right?

Well, actually it doesn't end all that badly. No one dies or suffers any huge injustice or gets pregnant or ruins their life (well, they don't ruin their life in any way that they weren't already doing so). The Death of the Heart is more of a psychological novel: when you boil the plot down, there isn't much that's all that remarkable. But the personalities are thoroughly and carefully described, so that even where I felt like I recognized a type each character felt like a real person, and I was interested to keep reading and understanding each one more thoroughly.

There are sparks of wit in the story, and the conversations are really brilliantly captured, but Elizabeth Bowen's writing style felt a little overdone to me. It didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book at all; every once in a while, though, I'd just sort of think, "yeah, ok, reign it in." Still, on the whole it's beautifully written, full of little observations.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved in part of one's self-respect... Alone, one has a rather incomplete outlook---one is not sure what is funny, what is not. One solid pleasure of love is to check up together on what has happened.

The humor part of it is fairly understated; it's not so much humor as, again, observations, but it's still really enjoyable and certainly capable of making me smile now and then.

Pas Avant les Domestiques might have been carved on the Peppinghams' diningroom mantelpiece, under Honi Soit qui Mal y Pense.

What's interesting about this is that Portia's personal history and connection to the other characters is so odd, and yet her experiences felt quite relatable. Portia is the product (that's kind of a gross word but it's hard to word this sentence otherwise) of her half-brother's father's late-in-life affair. Her quiet, apologetic upbringing, moving from cheap hotel to cheap hotel on the continent, was the outcome of her father's sense of shame and loss. When she comes to live with her half-brother, her mother has just died. I sort of thought this background would play more of a role than it did. I mean, it's the explanation for why she's so childish and mousy, for why she has so little experience of friendship or family, for why her half-brother and sister-in-law have so little affection for her, for why it's so awkward for her to be living with them. But, I don't know: Portia's feelings of loneliness, her uncertainty about her place in the world, and certainly her innocent experience of heartbreak all seemed fairly universal for a teenager. I mean, the whole thing hinges on Portia melting down because someone's been reading her diary! Teens!