The Brooknerian

I've been re-reading Cheryl Alexander Malcolm's excellent book Understanding Anita Brookner (University of South Carolina, 2002). Malcolm examines, in sequence, Brookner's first nineteen novels, which were published yearly from 1981 to 1999. She breaks them into contiguous groups, headlining them as follows: Can't Buy Me Love: A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me, Hotel du Lac What Child Is This...: Family and Friends, A Misalliance, A Friend from England, Latecomers Happily Ever After? Lewis Percy, Brief Lives, A Closed Eye Starting Over: Fraud, A Family Romance, A Private View Journeying to the End: Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Altered States, Visitors Back to the Beginning? Falling Slowly, Undue Influence In 2000 there was a break. The five novels of the 2000s were published in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2009. It would be interesting to see how Malcolm might characterise these works. They seem less easily categorisable, less homogeneous. In fact they...

Another gem from the  Spectator  archive. 'My Favourite Foreign Restaurant', 1987: I dislike important restaurants and do not really appreciate ambitious cooking. My choice of a place for lunch would be Queenie's Bar in Nice. It is an all-purpose café-restaurant which seems to be open whenever you want it to be. If your nerves are good you sit outside and watch the traffic on the Promenade des Anglais. If not, the interior is darkish and cool: there is, of course, no music. The chef shops daily in the market and the fish is good, infinitely better than anything one could get in London (except at Graham's, Brewer Street). The menu is sparse, which means that the dish of the day is reliable. The  tarte tatin  is superb.

'My Best and Worst Restaurants': A gem from the  Spectator , December 1984: My least favourite restaurant is the one at which I eat lunch every day and it had better not he named. It is a vegetarian restaurant and it leans heavily on quiches made with wholemeal flour; the food is incredibly good for me and it tastes like rubble. Surely, the best restaurant in England is Les Quat' Saisons, although I haven't tried it since it moved from Oxford. I remember delicate food, beautifully presented, and irresistible even to the faint-hearted. For heartier moods I like Le Dauphin, rue Saint-Honoré, Paris, an old-fashioned eating house which takes itself seriously but manages not to smell of food — a feat unknown to nearly every restaurant in London.

I recently, in an expansive moment, recommended Anita Brookner to a colleague. (I almost never proselytise in this way; nor am I much given to expansive moments.) This colleague is a political creature. She subscribes to the Guardian , is a member of the Labour Party, and likes the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. She calls me (unfairly and inaccurately) a wicked Tory. Afterwards (when the moment of expansiveness had passed), it occurred to me to wonder how my recommendation might appear politically. My colleague is a Brookner innocent. What will she make of Brookner? The question of Anita Brookner's politics is a vexed one. Plainly Brookner, like her characters, lived in comfortable circumstances. The ease with which her characters buy and sell London properties is notable, though not particularly remarked upon. Later characters, such as Julius Herz, do face a more challenging housing market. Nevertheless, there's probably lots of material in Brookner for a Marxist critique....

...those who did not rely on their inner resources, as she had been obliged to do, were forever condemned to weep in other women's drawing-rooms... Incidents in the Rue Laugier , Ch. 13 There is often much to be said of, much to be learned from, even a single line. Maud's emotional continence, not to say her chilliness, is succinctly expressed. It is interesting that it is women, not men, who provide the venue for undignified prostration: Brookner is not, we may recall, a member of the sisterhood. And such outbreaks take place, Brookner implies, not in living-rooms or lounges, but in drawing-rooms: there is, as so often in English fiction, a class aspect to the thing. Varied attitudes and assumptions are thus constructed and communicated. Finally there is the line's mandarin structure or style, which gives it the force of a quotable maxim. Brookner's messages are always austere, but the elegance of her medium shores her against absolute ruin.

There is no virtue in confession, although it is said to be good for the soul. Incidents in the Rue Laugier , Ch. 15 Anita Brookner interviews (I know of seven, five of which are on the web) are remarkable affairs, and may sound confessional. But they're also cle ver performances, full of artifice. There's a degree of repetition between exchanges, as though over the years she were issuing and riffing on a set of prepared statements. One is reminded of Samuel Johnson's comments on the eighteenth-century familiar letter, a form that at first appears open and honest and artless but is in fact highly premeditated and contrived (see Johnson's 'Pope', The Lives of the Poets ). Brookner, however much she might value a simpler approach ('I shall try to change,' says Blanche at the end of A Misalliance . 'Try to live a little more carelessly. Artlessly.'), nevertheless maintains a very careful carapace, a defence against all comers. As she told  ...

From the terse to the lyrical, Anita Brookner’s opening lines are often memorable. A Start in Life (1981) Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. With concision and aplomb Brookner sets out her stall. This is how to get yourself noticed. Brief Lives (1990) Julia died. I read it in The Times this morning. My French friend, Marie , never a Brookner fan, disliked Brief Lives , especially the opening; she objected to its bleakness and negativity. ‘Yes – and?’ I probably replied. It’s certainly a startling start to a novel, and if this almost gnomic line hasn’t found its way on to a T-shirt somewhere, then someone is missing a trick. Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early. A beautiful, rhythmic sentence, with Proustian resonances – and that second comma is surely the mark of a stylist (Brookner, in one of her book reviews, praises an author’s use of such a comma). O...