Incidents in the Rue Laugier reread: 'Too late'

Chapter 12 is rich with Proust, Paris and the return of Tyler, made more powerful by the length of his absence from the text. (Something similar will happen in Brookner's next novel, Altered States.)

The meeting with Tyler, though this is not referenced, is surely akin to the reunion at the end of Washington Square. When she parts from Tyler, Maud knows it will be 'for life, as it were'.

And so Incidents, such a strange novel, stutters towards its conclusion. Did Brookner conceive the frame narrative afterwards, or was it always intended? I think it might have been the former: this would explain the highly eccentric time scheme. The 'incidents' take place in 1971; Maffy, the daughter, is born in 1980 or thereabouts. Maffy then turns out to be the narrator of the frame narrative, which is written after the deaths of both Edward and Maud, the first of whom dies in his early fifties. The time of writing, therefore, of this narrative, published in 1995, must be well into the twenty-first century.

But it is all, of course, as the frame story reminds us, a 'fantasy', 'fictitious'. Brookner's 'postmodern' novel, like all such performances, stimulates more questions than it will ever answer. And to what end?

Insiders / Outsiders

Insiders out. Outsiders in, ran the header to a review of one of Brookner’s novels. But was she so much of an outsider? Did she not praise the reckless, the feckless, the careless? Did she not promote the riotous lives of the gods of antiquity? Didn’t she reject other, kinder philosophies? Whose side was she on? With whom, ultimately, did she throw in her lot?

The way to proceed, she once told us, was to start as an outsider, briefly to become an insider, and at last to resume the status of an outsider. That way the work got done.

Brookner said that in a review of Edmund White’s biography of Marcel Proust in the Sunday Times in 1999. Outsiders chiefly, sometime insiders too, consummate dandies both. As always Brookner chose her subjects with extreme precision.

This Disciple

As for the written word, this disciple of Marcel Proust and Henry James re-reads the classics, but scorns the 'negligible' fiction of today. Nabokov – dandy, émigré, melancholy wit – is the last great novelist for her.

2002 Independent interview

Taking it slowly, savouring its Jamesian rhythms, I've at last got to the end of my reread of A Family Romance. Dolly, its focus, appears at intervals throughout the novel, in different iterations or manifestations. Take this memorable vignette from chapter 7:

...her bitter European face, as revealed in sleep, in the half light of the car, the effervescent mask for once cast aside and the grim working woman revealed.

And in chapter 8 we see her later still, at sixty-eight, reduced, all but friendless, with navy-blue hair and no make-up and wearing flat shoes.

This late incarnation of Dolly is very striking and the scene well handled. One is reminded of Nabokov and the end of Lolita, when he presents Lolita as grown-up, pregnant, ruined, and this is the version the narrator at last falls in love with.

Or one hears echoes of Proust's Swann when Dolly, explaining the attractiveness of her worthless paramour, says, 'Harry was my type; do you understand?'

Near the end of A Family Romance is a line that some critics at the time found difficult to accept, but which seems to grow in integrity as the years go by. As I've said before, Brookner's are novels for the future.

But I realised then that love was unpredictable, that it could not be relied upon to find a worthy object, that it might attach itself to someone for whom one has felt distaste, even detestation, that it is possible to experience an ache in the heart because the face that responds to one's own circumspect smile is eager, trusting.

A Life Fully Lived

Brookner's critiques of other novelists always claim our attention. In the novels they're rather thin on the ground, in contrast to her extended references to the fine arts*. Proust, whom (thanks to Julian Barnes) we know Brookner read and reread avidly, is a case in point. There are mere scattered mentions of the writer in, for example, Strangers, and Proust's famous first line is quoted in Incidents in the Rue Laugier. These are, like Brookner's other literary references, conventional and less than illuminating.

For illumination we must go to her critical writings. I hope one day someone will publish a collected edition of Brookner's reviews and essays. There is the online Spectator archive, but its search facility is far from satisfactory. One comes upon Brookner essays more by chance than design. I found this the other day, a review of a volume of Proust's letters. As ever in her non-fiction Brookner makes brilliant points, not least in the way she brackets Proust with Freud, thus linking two writers of interest and relevance to herself:

One of the most interesting lacunae in Proust's overflowing correspondence was caused by an inauspicious lapse of time: he could not have read Marie Nordlinger's translations of Freud, for he died before they were published. On the other hand Freud might have read Proust, but probably did not. It might be objected that neither needed to read the other, since their discoveries and conclusions were remarkably similar, analysis and self-analysis being two sides of the same coin. Freud worked logically, Proust intuitively: the last line of Time Regained was written before the first line of the first volume, so Freudianly dependent on that personal pronoun. The story that Proust has to tell us is more complete than any that Freud might have elicited from his patients, but one which he would have understood for himself: the progress from childhood anxiety through the mutations of experience and sociability to recognition, perhaps haggard recognition, of the inevitability of death. Thus time regained is by virtue of the same process time foregone.

Spectator, 22 Jan 2000

Elsewhere in the review her preoccupations become more personal still. One cannot but think that Brookner, in her essays, as elsewhere, is really talking only about herself.

Yet in these late letters, when time is running out, he remains a solipsist, defending his work against all comers. His fine manners never desert him, yet to critics he offers criticism in return. The novel sustained him through unimaginable discomforts. The life was the work. In every sense it was a life fully lived.

*** 

*Brookner's use of paintings in her novels is deserving of deeper study. In another Spectator review she praised the seductiveness and enlightenment of Eric Karpeles' Paintings in Proust.

References to painters and paintings are numerous in the novel, revealing an attention to detail with which Proust enhances - or, in the present author’s word, accessorises - his characters.