[In the following review, Broughton complains about the pretentiousness of the main characters in Gilchrist's Starcarbon.]

There are forty-five names mapped on to the family tree that prefaces this novel: forty-five characters, from five generations of Hands and Mannings. Readers who have followed Ellen Gilchrist’s saga of the Deep South will have a head start on newcomers and will recognize Olivia de Havilland Hand as the half-Native American niece, rescued by her novelist aunt, Anna (of The Anna Papers and elsewhere), and restored, in I Cannot Get You Close Enough, to her birthright of wealth and privilege as the long-lost daughter of the feckless and tipsy heart-throb, Daniel Hand. Even those familiar with the intricacies of Hand genealogy, and with its generations of trusty family retainers, will still have to contend with Olivia’s equally fecund Cherokee kin. To stay within the compass of human memory, sagas traditionally involve plenty of smiting hip and thigh. This is what Gilchrist’s oeuvre badly needs: a bout of bloody feuding to dispose of excess personnel.

Starcarbon unapologetically rehearses Gilchrist’s pet theme: the family romance. Boy meets girl. Girl is in love with her emotionally unavailable father. Boy wins girl by being unlike Daddy—happy ending—or by resembling him—unhappy ending. Either way, droves of psychiatrists are kept in full employment, and the Hand-Manning genes survive to fight another day. It is now the summer of 1991, and Olivia is back in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, trying to balance her allegiance to her tribal roots with her fascination for the glamorous “world of possibility”, represented by Daniel and his Old Money. Should Olivia learn to programme computers in Navajo? Should she return to her prissy liberal arts degree in North Carolina? Should she settle down with Bobby Tree, her rodeo-champion boyfriend? Who will pay her therapist if she does? Meanwhile, in New Orleans, her similarly troubled half-sister, Jessie, is paying the price for marrying a Daniel-substitute—the beautiful but unreliable King Mallison. She represents to Olivia all that is disgusting—and seductive—about life within the southern clan. With a new baby pinned to her breast like a brooch, and plagued by a wastrel husband, Jessie may be both bored and beleaguered, but at least there are plenty of cousins, servants and psychiatrists on hand to take the strain.

For all its insistence on history and regional difference, Gilchrist’s saga seems to sieve its heroines into a curious uniformity. Olivia’s life may have the trappings of modernity; she may be an expert bareback rider; she may even have a surrogate father called Little Sun, who speaks in portentous Tonto-like decrees. Yet with the same armour of “lipstick and powder” and the same flimsy cultural weapons, she seems to be fighting exactly the same battles as her southern foremothers: how to keep two men happy and still have time for an education.

Perhaps the only difference between this young generation of neurotic nineteen-year-olds and their great aunts at the same age is their fluency in pop psychology. When Rhoda Manning announced, in Net of Jewels, that she “was cathected by a narcissist”, it was disturbing and piquant: a painful spitting-out of the obvious. Olivia and her friends have been nursed on “goddamn psychology bullshit”: they spout Jung and Everyday Zen and “interrupted bonding”, and advise each other that “the joy of loving someone is in loving them, not in being loved”.

The problem of reconciling autonomy and love is still a perfectly respectable, even sympathetic, theme. Yet Gilchrist’s contemporary protagonists manage somehow to sully the drama with their ersatz knowingness. “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes”, aunt Helen replies ecstatically to Mike’s proposal of marriage. “And the thing Mike liked remembering about that moment was that he knew she had never read Joyce.” Mike should be ashamed of himself.

Away from the hormonal maelstrom, Gilchrist’s minor characters are sketched with warmth and zest. The adolescent twins, Taylor and Tucker, are at once nightmarish and horribly plausible. Daniel’s farm-manager, Spook, is memorably wry. The novel’s ageing roués and their gold-digging mistresses, the psychiatrists, even the horses are crisply drawn. But the central characters lapse too frequently into pretentiousness to ensure our loyalty, and the family tree may soon need pruning.