Stalemate

She believes that therapy is the answer to the sort of stalemate at which we have arrived, and I dare not tell her that this stalemate suits me well enough, for I intend to proceed no further.

Altered States, ch. 17

This is the last in my series of posts on Altered States. I found it, on rereading, both chilly and chilling. It has the atmosphere of a ghost story, as more than one critic has pointed out. A number of the Nineties Brookners seem to have this low temperature, this sense of dead calm after great storms. Altered States is an autumnal, a wintry book.