The Brooknerian

For so apparently metropolitan a writer suburbia exerts a curious lure. Lewis Percy was Brookner's explicitly 'suburban novel'. In other works - Visitors - the areas beyond the centre are foci for nostalgia and a sense of lost authenticity. In A Private View , Bland's London home, by comparison with his dreams of the past, seems 'flimsy, meretricious, unconvincing'. The encounters with Katy Gibb in her differing guises - hippy, waif, courtesan - crackle with energy. Brookner hates her but is fascinated. The private view is under way. Reading Brookner is an education in looking. Some might say she interprets too much from characters' outward appearances. But one would counter-argue that Brookner the art critic is at work - looking, looking, looking, and missing nothing. As a child, she said, she was very good at looking. Bland isn't Brookner, but she sneaks in little details. He has, for example, large hands. Anita Brookner, one notices, also had l...

She lived a life, then wrote about it: that was the myth. The writing part of her life, that second life, second career, was somehow posthumous. But it possibly wasn’t like that. And how could it have been? A. N. Wilson, after her death (and this could have been said only then), wrote of having met her at a party in the late 1980s or 90s. The party was given by a London publisher with whom Anita was (wrote Wilson) hopelessly in love. She was in her sixties, he in his forties. She seemed to disappear from the party. Later he found her, in the man’s bedroom, sitting on his bed, on which were piled all the guests’ coats. She was staring sadly ahead and had been sitting there for more than an hour. It was, said Wilson (unnecessarily), the closest she would get to this man’s bed. One prefers the myth. The great writer, high and dry, with her messy life behind her. But search in the archives, deep in the protean early years of her novel-writing, and you come upon white-hot glimpses. Fr...

Anita was a neighbour of mine in Chelsea, and several residents in the square were very sorry to hear of her death. We tried to be courteous to her when we met her, but she was always alone, never with a single person in the decades she lived here. It seemed a shame, for such an intelligent woman. She was always very polite, but it was only a brief sentence to any of us that knew her, and met her when she was out walking. I am glad to know that she died in her sleep, but the truth was that she was not given enough care in hospital, due to nurses being short staffed, and she was not got out of bed and given rehabilitation. This was following a serious fire a few weeks ago, due to her smoking, from which she was rescued. We will all miss her, as she was a resident for so many years in the square.  The above was an anonymous reader's comment appended to  A. N. Wilson's Mail Online obituary article * from March last year. I have mentioned both before. Previously I didn't q...

Anita Brookner died at the age of 87 on 10 March, 2016 – impossible date. She experienced her own next big thing just days after the centenary of Henry James’s death. The conjunction remained unlauded in the many obituaries I examined, most of which seemed to be culled from one another and thick with clichés, the usual tired stuff about this most misunderstood and, by then, all but forgotten writer. But her passing gave her a moment of publicity. For a while, if you typed ‘Anita’ into Google, her name appeared in the list of suggestions. She was suddenly everywhere. ‘Oh, Anita!’ tweeted one friend, as if she had committed some sort of faux pas . Indeed, during the week that followed, I was aware of the vulgarity of most death notices, and of much such comment. How she would have hated some of the pieces. How she would have squirmed at the freedom with which people now spoke of her. She lost dignity, was fair game – an historical figure now, her reputation up for grabs. In fact I re...