(Borrowed from the Mid-town NYPL at 40th St.): Nancy Mitford's comic novel is funny and disconcerting. I found myself laughing hysterically at the antics of the heroine's eccentric landed-gentry family, but then recoiling at their disgusting traits. The patriarch Uncle Matthew is a violent, bigoted bully but he's so funny. Kind of like Archie Bunker with an upper-crust accent. Matthew dominates his family, beats his children, harbors racist attitudes towards all foreigners, yet he's riotously unfettered by the constraints of mannered society. He is described as a "cardboard ogre." The heroine, his daughter Linda, is totally amoral and self-absorbed, drifting from marriage to marriage, and finally ending as the kept mistress of a charming French Duke. She marries a Nazi-sympathizing Tory politician, then a Communist freedom fighter, neither of whom she really loves. She does throw herself into refugee service work while married to the radical, but as soon as she leaves him she spends her days in pre-war Paris shopping for clothes.
Mitford based the characters on her own illustrious family and the book offers a fascinating look at life in England among the gentry between the wars. I did laugh out loud several times but also cringed as often.
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