In Love All, Elizabeth Jane Howard has taken domestic drama to the max. Reading it - a pleasurable if untaxing experience - won't change your life, but it may inspire you to paint your kitchen or living-dining room a strong Chinese yellow at one end and duck-egg blue at the other, to prepare a haunch of rabbit for the cat and to shun pricey interior decorators called Mario who have a taste for “passage pictures” featuring nasty country pursuits.

The characters in this novel, set in the late 1960s, are rather overshadowed by their houses, which are personalities in their own right, from the inappropriately imposing to the snugly homely. Among the people who live in them are several who are prematurely parentless, either through death or abandonment. A young woman, Persephone (Percy) Plover, is the only child of a faraway diplomat and his wandering wife. The rather older Thomas Musgrove and his sister, Mary, were left behind in Melton, a small West Country town, when their parents moved to Kenya, where they were killed in a car crash. Thomas's wife, Celia, also died in a car accident, leaving their small daughter Hattie to be the latest orphan in the family.

Both Percy and Hattie have been rescued from desolate childhoods by aunts. In Percy's case, the aunt is Floy, an elderly spinster and landscape gardener, who devotes herself to her niece; in Hattie's, it is Mary who, after Celia's death, gave up her London lover, career and flat to look after her brother's child in Melton, Thomas being too far gone in grief and whisky to be any sort of a father. The Musgroves live at Home Farm, where Thomas runs a not very successful garden centre.

By a series of deft manoeuvres, the author brings both Floy and Percy to Melton to work for Jack Curtis, a property developer and the new owner of Melton House, which he has had unattractively overdone-up by the aforementioned Mario. The house once belonged to the Musgrove family and much is made of the differences between their present establishment - shabby and cluttered but fragrant with the smell of the home-made jams that Mary unceasingly bottles - and Jack's sumptuous, unwelcoming pile. Jack isn't happy there but, reading Mansfield Park at Percy's urging, he smugly notes that his own house is superior to Jane Austen's imagined one on account of its glasshouses and formal kitchen garden.

With the cast assembled at Melton, the action begins. A local arts festival is planned and arouses uncultured antagonism. As one worthy puts it, “You're not going to make money from getting people like Dickens and that other fellow [Angus Wilson] talking about each other, if people haven't heard of them.”

Howard, like Jane Austen, to whom there are several references in the novel, is good on middle-class rural life, where neighbours are standoffish (“They knew enough of one another not to want to know any more”) yet yearn for intimacy. “It would be nice, [Jack] thought, if I was the most important person, if somebody couldn't do other things because of me.”

Limited social contact seems to result in self-delusion; it is impossible for these excessively guarded people to have any idea how others perceive them, and ill-considered proposals of marriage embarrassingly occur. Because of what Jack calls “this lacking thing” (an inability to recognise what love entails), it is by no means clear who is going to end up with whom and, as important, in which house.

The outcome is not universally happy but is perhaps inevitable. Howard's style is leisurely, flitting from character to character, studying each individual dilemma in a way that is entertaining and heartfelt so that Love All is as satisfying as a good gossip.

Love All by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Macmillan £16.99 pp454

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