Word: aubreys
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...three buoyant, beautiful Tucker sisters, all widowed early, who dominate the hero's childhood and the first half of this funny, rueful novel of morals and manners. The other figure who keeps recurring and who comes to obsess Nathan is the women's brooding "outside" -- or illegitimate -- cousin, Aubrey Bradshaw...
Eventually, Nathan finds out that as a teenager his mother was in love with Aubrey; in fact he paid court to all three girls. Nathan first becomes aware of him, though, during a train trip carrying the body of Nathan's grandfather, a U.S. Senator, from Washington to Knoxville. Aubrey was not welcome aboard, and the Tucker sisters, now young matrons, are particularly appalled by his efforts to join the funeral party. The journey is one of Taylor's best comic set pieces, a deadpan account of how the drunken antics of the male mourners caused a series of unseemly...
After that, Aubrey simply disappears, though Nathan believes he sometimes sees him, usually at funerals. The rest of In the Tennessee Country follows Nathan's adult life. Though Trudie wanted him to become an artist, he settles for being an art historian, and Taylor makes an elegant sketch of the bramble of academic politics. On his retirement, Nathan becomes preoccupied with Aubrey to the degree that his son Brax, who really is a painter, becomes bored and annoyed. It is Brax who finds Aubrey, now a dying ancient, and Brax who chooses finally to follow his path and live...
...admire Taylor for the sublime tact of his writing; no one's behavior, however bizarre, causes a ripple in Nathan's gentle but exacting account. The problem lies with Aubrey. He repudiates the Tuckers and the hypocrisy that kept him a true outsider. "Compromise," he intones. "That's their rule of life." And he blames Nathan for being "part of the world he was born into...
Middlemarch has such a tangle of subplots that viewers unfamiliar with the novel may find themselves in need of a trot to avoid getting lost. As usual with BBC productions, the atmospherics and costumes are spot on and the performances are consistently competent. Aubrey, a grave, wide-eyed newcomer, stands out as a luminous Dorothea...