Is Brookner our contemporary? It might be a strange question to ask of a writer active so recently, whose last work of fiction was published in 2011. But even then there was less labelling, less ready codification of social and emotional malaise. In 2011 we heard talk of mental health less often, though not quite as infrequently as in 1981, when Brookner's first novel came out. Hermione Lee, Brookner's later biographer, offers an insightful, psychoanalytical review ( here ) of A Friend from England , one of Brookner's 1980s novels, inexplicably now out of print. Though the protagonist, Rachel, hasn't read Freud, 'Freud,' says Lee, 'would have wanted to read her': [S]he is an extreme case in the Brookner hospital, off in her own isolation ward. Time and again Brookner's characters worry the reader. Nominatively determined Herz, in The Next Big Thing , endures cardiac discomfort, but his visit to his GP baffles the harassed young doctor, with talk of F...
The life, work, novels and intertexts of Anita Brookner