The Brooknerian

Brookner's second novel, Providence , published in 1982, has several extended scenes set in Kitty Maule's tutorial room. For Kitty Maule read Anita Brookner, a lazy but inevitable parallel. The tutorials focus on a nineteenth-century French novel, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant, about a young man's affair with an older woman. Now in 2022 we add to the mix a third slim volume, Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes. Elizabeth Finch is a tutor, not in French literature (like Kitty Maule) or art history (Brookner) but in 'Culture and Civilisation'. The viewpoint in the tutorial room isn't Elizabeth/Kitty/Anita's, but rather a Julian Barnes substitute, a student named Neil who soon becomes fascinated by his inspirational teacher. Finch shares many of Brookner's peculiarities: her appearance, her clothes, her big eyes, her hair, her smoking, her voice, her diction, her handwriting, her high seriousness, her lunch habits (seventy-five minutes max.). Or rather she sha...

In the absence of more reliable signposts one seeks parallels in literature. In the time ahead, when every day, for many, will seem like Christmas Day, one thinks of Anna Durrant in Anita Brookner's Fraud (1992), the lonely walk Anna takes across a deserted, Pompeii-still London in windless air under a low grey sky. Later in the novel another character, the elderly Mrs Marsh, nurses her son Nick through a bout of the flu. His convalescence is powerfully described, the reduction in his routine, his devotion to the predictable rhythms of the Radio 4 schedule. A recent New Yorker piece ( here ) considered episodes of social distancing in Victorian novels: Bleak House, Jane Eyre . Elsewhere in Brookner there are more than several chapters on illness and recovery. One recalls the end of Look at Me (1983), Frances cared for like a child after her traumatic night walk; or the horribly extended migraine that afflicts the protagonist in A Misalliance (1986) and the blessed ministrat...

The character of Nigel, dignified and likeable at first, but given to psychobabble, gradually falls victim to a sort of novelistic passive aggression. The existence somewhere in his background of an analyst* is inferred by the narrator, indeed imagined in some detail, though never confirmed. For her part she's 'too proud, or too ashamed (they are the same thing) ever to have confided, to have confessed in any company' (ch. 14). Brookner herself was asked by at least one interviewer whether she'd undergone analysis. She hadn't. And she wasn't about to start. It would take too long. And she might doubt the intelligence of the interrogator. It's a breathtaking answer. But she was a devotee of Freud. Her novel Strangers has an epigraph by Freud, a rare honour in Brookner. One thinks of Herz too, in The Next Big Thing , talking to an uncomprehending GP of Freud's experience on the Acropolis, of having 'gone beyond the father' (ch. 7). Or one ...

What's your favourite Brookner line? Something positively freighted with many things Brooknerian. Something perhaps only Anita Brookner could have written. Look at Me A novel replete with quotability. I'm going to choose one of the most extreme, almost self-parodic lines, from the truly chilling chapter 11: Frances's desolate trek through a hostile nighttime London: This must be the most terrible hour, the hour when people die in hospitals. (Larkinian too. Think 'Ambulances' or 'The Building' - each room farther from the last and harder to return from.) Falling Slowly Miriam is imagining the thoughts of her contemporaries, those with lives more conventional than her own. You are not one of us, she imagines them thinking. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not grow fat. You do not take family holidays, the car loaded with junk. You only look astonishingly young, but you must be getting on. Too late for you, then. Y...

In one of Anita’s later novels, the female protagonist, when having supper alone in her flat, regularly has a glass of white wine. Being interested in wine, I couldn’t help noticing that each time supper occurred, the wine was different: first a chardonnay, then a pinot grigio, then a sauvignon, and so on; but the last wine to be drunk in the book was, unexpectedly, sweet – a sauternes. I wondered if such changingness might be significant, intended perhaps as an emblem of the protagonist’s volatility. At lunch I mentioned this theory, and referred to that puzzling late switch from dry to sweet. ‘Oh no,’ replied Anita unconcernedly, ‘I just went into a shop and copied down the names.’ Julian Barnes, Guardian , March 2016 No one ever gets drunk in an Anita Brookner novel. The character identified by Julian Barnes is probably Blanche in A Misalliance - a very mild toper, all things considered. Very mild in comparison with, for example, the folk to be found in an average Kingsle...

This blog's current strapline - 'out of sheer dandyism' - comes from A Misalliance, ch. 3. In the following year's Brookner, A Friend from England , we find another striking phrase: I was no longer the dandy of my imaginings, invulnerable, amused, passing lightly through life, with my feelings well protected. (Ch. 6)

Why were some of Anita Brookner's novels published in the US with different titles? This seems at best a faintly disreputable practice, at worst an assault on the integrity of an already published text. I can think of other authors who have suffered the indignity, though it tends to be reserved for less thoroughgoingly literary writers (Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse). Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant was, however, given the somewhat unwieldy US title Bullivant and the Lambs . I can't think of traffic in the opposite direction, but there are probably examples. Is it a case of US publishers asserting their authority? Or are there cultural or other reasons that certain titles 'work' in Britain but not in America? A Start in Life (UK) / The Debut (US) For a novel that references Balzac, The Debut  is an interesting alternative, echoing Balzac's  Un début dans la vie . A Misalliance (UK) / The Misalliance (US) Do Americans prefer t...

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  ...

Interviewer: So far all your novels have been the same length, around two hundred pages, with the same group of characters and more or less the same circumstances producing the same results. (Although  Family and Friends  has a bigger cast of characters.) Are you not afraid of being accused of writing to a formula, even though of your own creation? Brookner: I have been so accused! But the latest book,  The Misalliance , is much longer and has a broader canvas. It is quite different from the others... Paris Review  interview, 1987 We have spoken of Richardson's Clarissa , which comes in at around a million words. We have mentioned Dickens and Trollope, some of whose novels are more than three hundred thousand words long. Such vastness suits them. Shorter novels such as Great Expectations can seem too pacy, even rather rushed. A teacher from my university years,  Alison Light , in her studies of Interwar fiction, has talked of shell-shocked readers a...

In a  recent post  I discussed Brookner, Brooknerians, and smoking. I am immensely grateful to Bookglutton (@bookglutton1) on Twitter for alerting me (@brooknerian) to the following smokers. In Brief Lives there's Vinnie, Fay's rakish mother-in-law: Her daily routine was to get up at about ten-thirty, smoke the first cigarette of the day, take a bath and dress, and then apply the heavy make-up, without which she looked like a seamed and battered twelve-year-old. (Ch. 3) And in A Misalliance , we find Sally Beamish, a true Brookner monster, a careless insider, careless as the gods of antiquity: As far as Blanche could see, Sally spent those days ... simply lying on her chaise-longue , smoking, and waiting for someone to turn up. (Ch. 5) But what of Blanche, the ostensible Brooknerian, but morally vulnerable, flirting with other lives, and a toper to boot? Yes, we find her taking a drag too. I can find one reference, in Chapter 11; there may be more.

[On A Misalliance :] …it wasn’t a very good book, but it wasn’t  that  bad either. I have written it off. I didn’t like it even as I was writing it.  Paris Review interview, 1987 ( Link )  [On the early fiction:] I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I'm doing now … They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead to no revelations … I don't like any of them very much.  Independent interview, 2002 ( Link ) Writers rarely estimate correctly the value of their own work. James disowned The Bostonians , did not include it in his collected edition. Likewise, two early Brookners seem to have slipped from the radar, and are increasingly difficult to source: A Friend from England and A Misalliance . Buy them when you can.

Brookner was a migraine sufferer, as she revealed in 1993 in a review of Oliver Sacks's treatise on the condition. 'The neural tumult,' we read, 'may produce a feeling of such dread and helplessness as to encompass certain elements of the human condition.' Brookner continues with 'a report from the front': I learn from this book (and I allow that this may occur from actually reading the book) that my headaches are in fact migrainous and not untypical, and that the sensation of waking from a dream with the onset of a migraine is fairly standard. In fact it is probable that the precipitating dream, which is accompanied by a feeling of panic or horror, may be implicated in the migraine itself. Waking, which is always abrupt, is not caused by anything as specific as the alarm going off or the radio coming on. A rapidly beating heart may continue for an hour, to be succeeded by a pain over the left eye. More interesting than the pain, which is unpleasant bu...