The Rules of Engagement: Any Show of Warmth

It's easy at times to sympathise with Brookner's detractors, that small army of reviewers who delighted in reporting she'd written the same book for the umpteenth time with just a few punctuation changes. When we get to late Brookner the echoes of earlier works have become deafening. It could be seen as a service to the fans. We might take pleasure in the evocations of Paris, in the London place names, in a character who bears more than a passing resemblance to someone from an earlier favourite... But the process - Brookner's obsessive retreading and reworking and reimagining - also yields discoveries none of us would be without. Elizabeth in chapter 2 of The Rules of Engagement is 'excluded by some sort of biological misunderstanding'. It's the culmination of a passage that casts back as far as Frances Hinton and Look at Me, and yet manages to be new, and full of new hurt:

...I also knew, or came to know, that I was not the kind of woman who sent out the right messages. This puzzled and saddened me, but I accepted it. I was quite nice-looking, and I thought I behaved like everybody else, but I began to suspect that women are either instantly recognisable as potential lovers or somehow fail the test in ways so subtle that there seems no possibility of adjustment. The result was that however many times I went to the same restaurant I was not greeted with any show of warmth and was left to eat my meal more or less unattended.