Amy Henderson, the central character in [Blaming] …, is a woman of average intelligence and limited sensibility. She is 'nice' to the extent that she does her best to conceal the boredom and irritation seething inside her, but otherwise she isn't particularly likeable. She has the good manners of the thoughtless, the tact of the uninvolved. She knows only her own problems. She bears a striking resemblance to a hell of a lot of people.
Blaming is largely about Amy's widowhood—how she endures it, and how it changes her. The book covers a year in her life. Her slight progress from total absorption in her own misery to a state of mind bordering on the self-forgetful is charted by Mrs Taylor with all her old artistry—that enviable compound of beady-eyed detachment and sympathetic understanding. Under her steady gaze, Amy is allowed to get away with nothing. Grief makes this privileged woman in her pretty house by the Thames even more exasperated, even more suspicious of other people's motives. She 'puts a brave face on things' (there are dozens of 'brave faces' in Mrs Taylor's fiction) more out of custom than consideration. The strongest emotion she feels is fury—fury with Nick for dying; fury with the solicitous Martha, who escorts her back to England and then has the nerve to intrude on her privacy; fury with her son and his wife and their two daughters. It is the fury of someone who doesn't want help, who doesn't need humouring. It is an aspect of bereavement that few novelists care to investigate. (p. 380)
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