The Brooknerian

'I plan to become dangerous and subversive,' says Blanche in chapter 5 of A Misalliance , before (as she puts it) 'raving on about Henry James'. 'A silly girl,' says Blanche of Milly* Theale in  The Wings of the Dove . 'She should have bought that rotter outright. What else is money for?' And so Blanche continues to purchase the company of her own new acquaintances, Sally and her daughter. Quantities of ten-pound notes are placed under the lid of a chipped teapot in Sally's ruinous kitchen. It is not the only time in Brookner that protagonists buy the time of others. One thinks of Elizabeth in 'At the Hairdresser's' or George Bland in A Private View . Each time the donation of funds is effected in clandestine ways, bringing analogous transactions into the mind of Brookner's knowing and fallen ideal reader. Not that Blanche's wealth is really quite in the same ballpark as Milly Theale's. But Sally's former mythic ex...

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...

The Next Big Thing  presents a hero shaken by lust after a lifetime of humbly 'making things better'. Seventysomething Julius Herz, the third male protagonist in recent novels, is a self-effacing childhood émigré from Germany. Late in life, he finds release from the family ties that bound him to a solitary stoicism. Passive, obedient, too keen to please, Julius shares more than his  Mitteleuropa  background with some of his female forerunners. As I list his traits, Brookner breaks in: 'He's me, really. You were longing to say that, weren't you? And I thought I was making him up. That's what happens. That's where Freud is right.' 2002 Independent interview 'He's me, really.' The Next Big Thing - Anita Brookner's Madame Bovary 'C'est moi!' novel? It's a tempting notion. The novel is probably my favourite Brookner, though when I first read it, in 2002, I thought it a reheating of several previous works, A Private Vie...

Art doesn't love you and cannot console you , said Anita Brookner. It's a discomforting assertion. When I examine my own intake or uptake of art - by which I mean my reading, for primarily I'm literary, verbal - I realise consolation is one of the chief things I look for. My sudden blogging, my sudden and tardy engagement with the Internet, after years of silence, has somewhat changed my reading habits. I now read more, and with more purpose. I look at what others are reading and am influenced. Or else I'm reduced, made to feel subtly inferior. These other folk - how quickly and how widely they read! Much of my reading is now rereading. I read new things infrequently. I try new authors hardly at all. I favour books about certain types or classes of character and set in certain locations. I'm really very choosy, very small-minded. I've come to the end of Trollope, an almost exclusive preference of mine through my twenties and thirties. I never thought I'd e...

'About the Author' jacket pieces have always fascinated me, probably because I grew up in a time of information scarcity, i.e. before the Internet. I've listed Brookner's 'About the Author' texts  in a previous post : what I noted was the way the information grew sparser as the decades went by. In early versions we were given her academic credentials; mid-period pieces were both detailed and ludic ('She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988, when she abandoned her title of Reader in the History of Art at the University of London for the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea and the cultivation of certain fictional characters who may one day appear in future novels.'), whereas the biographies accompanying her last novels were terse, reluctant, almost brusque. Which brings me to 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011). A new form - an e-book, a novella - and so, perhaps, a new start. This 'About the Auth...

Indirection: a Brooknerian word: One had simply to exist, in a state of dreamy indirection, for the plot to work itself out. The Bay of Angels , Ch. 1 And in a review of William Trevor's stories , she praises their Chekhovian plotlessness, discretion, indirection. She might, of course, be speaking of her own fiction, but for the moment I want to think about reading. Having recently reread Brookner's twenty-first century novels, I find myself like Elizabeth Warner in 'At the Hairdresser's' at a loose end with 'nothing to read'. Some re-readers proceed chronologically; others follow leads. I might be tempted, for example, inspired by the Venetian scenes in Strangers , to read A Friend from England next - alongside The Wings of the Dove , say. I don't know. Perhaps I shouldn't be so ordered; perhaps I should, like Polonius, by indirections find directions out.

I am now alone, which takes a bit of getting used to; one has to nerve oneself every day. It really is existential living. Haffenden interview, Methuen 1985 Once the morning had been got through my failure of nerve would be without witnesses... 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011), Ch. 5

'I'll give him a call. You'll be quite safe with him.' This was met with some cheerful sniggering, which I ignored... 'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 4 'Chris is taking you home?' asked Sally, at reception. 'No, not today.' 'Was he okay? Only he can be a bit...' Ibid ., Ch. 8 Fissures open up all over the place in this most troubling of texts. Are the girls in the salon in league with Chris? They certainly recommend the arrangement. What do they know? There are other unfathomables, not least Chris's ambiguous sexuality, resonant in the first of the quotes above. If 'At the Hairdresser's' had evolved into a novel, as I suspect had been the intention, Brookner would probably have explored these matters more fully. But the work's very spareness presents us with a degree of potential not found in her other fiction.

Twice in 'At the Hairdresser's' Elizabeth complains that she has nothing to read. She reads only the classics now, and is presently engaged with Thomas Mann. But he is found wanting. To have nothing to read may seem a minor grumble, but for Elizabeth the situation is grave. Her routines are important to her: 'any break ... held a superstitious indication of ultimate change' (Ch. 4). Having nothing to read means she has no way of filling her days. This leaves her perilously open to offers. For reading, read writing. There are some writers for whom writing is a compulsion: it is their drink, their drugs. Trollope was one, starting the next book notoriously soon on the heels of the previous. He continued writing right up to the wire, though he was in considerable distress. With 'At the Hairdresser's' Anita Brookner comes to an end. What was her life like when she had nothing to write?

Just why and how does 'At the Hairdresser's' generate in the reader such a sense of unease and alarm? Elizabeth Warner may be Brookner's most vulnerable protagonist - and it isn't just that she's physically dependent, but there's a moral vulnerability too, a disposability 'to make-believe affections' (Ch. 7), a dangerous openness to suggestions. She is, quite simply, only too happy to fall in with Chris's plans. All the while she has her suspicions, knows that what is being presented to her is very probably a performance, a fiction, knows that the nature of the relationship cannot bear too close a level of scrutiny. Indeed Brookner goes further, setting out in provocative terms the compromises being entered into: I was wasting money, I knew that, but his presence was agreeable, and it seemed a fair exchange. I knew perfectly well that I was paying for his company, as I had never in my life done before... (Ch. 6)  And I had nothing to read. Bu...

Old age is the great unwritten subject. Let me specify. Novels about old age, written by old people, are rare. Great writers of the past either didn't write about old age, or included old people as peripheral figures, or were young themselves when they wrote about the old, or wrote about 'old' people we wouldn't now consider as such. To take a few disparate examples: Trollope's 'old man' in An Old Man's Love is only fifty; Lear was written by a man in his forties; Vita Sackville-West wrote All Passion Spent * when she was thirty-eight. Authentic depictions of old age in present-day literature are increasing, but remain novelties. One thinks of Diana Athill's memoirs or Clive James's late poems. Then there is Anita Brookner. We had intimations in A Private View , Visitors and The Next Big Thing , but Strangers and, especially, 'At the Hairdresser's' are Brookner's plainest examples. The story of Elizabeth Warner, her fear and vu...

I accept the fact that we are all atomized and there is little we can do about it. 'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 2 In late Brookner the modern world intrudes more and more. There are mobile phones, and, in The Rules of Engagement , a tentative reference to email. Yet Brookner wasn't really at all out of touch. Her reading, in particular, was varied and surprising. Frederic Raphael , for example, was surprised by and not a little sniffy about her championing of Michel Houellebecq’s works. Brookner belied her reputation, decrying the moral censorship Houellebecq was subject to, and presenting a worldliness her fans wouldn't have been taken aback by: He is, after all, in the grip of a major idea, with which he appears to have come to terms, namely that there are no penalties for indulging in the most extreme forms of sexual licence, that monogamous partnerships have passed into history, and that it is entirely natural to pursue sexual pleasure until such time as ...

He had been immersed in a reverie ... He had been back in the old house, although this time the house had a wider context, was grounded in the neighbourhood of his childhood ... a greengrocer, a chemist... Strangers (2009), Ch. 6 I go back in my mind to all the rooms I have slept in, remember in detail the streets of my earliest perambulations: that chemist on the corner... 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011), Ch. 2 These two final fictions share details and themes. This is true of other contiguous novels in the Brookner canon, but Strangers is separated by four years from its predecessor, an unprecedented gap; such isolation gives Strangers and 'At the Hairdresser's' a special affinity with one another.

All gone now, all over, and himself the survivor. The Next Big Thing , Ch. 1 All gone now, myself the unlikely and unwilling survivor... 'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 1 One comes across these echoes in Brookner. It is often the case with prolific writers. Is 'All gone now ... survivor' a quotation, or simply a phrase Brookner liked?

Missing from the archive, as it were, are Anita Brookner's short stories. One is rather glad she never wrote them. I've never much enjoyed short stories. Does anyone, really? In my earliest days as a Brookner fan, I became aware of what seemed to have been a Brookner story, 'A Wedding', published in an old copy of Granta . The 1984 date and the title suggested, perhaps, connections with Hotel du Lac or, more likely, Family and Friends . But I was hopeful for a lost classic. I searched old bookshops and the like. This was in that golden or that dark time before the Internet. I never found what I was looking for - but of course it's online now,  and only a click away . And of course it's only the opening chapter of Family and Friends . There were no more such 'stories'. There was 'At the Hairdresser's' in 2011, but that always seems like a short novel. One is indeed relieved Brookner steered clear of the short story form. At their wor...

Having lived for many years not quite a half-life but certainly a reduced one, I haven't really had the chance to meet fellow Brooknerians. This is a deficit made good in some wise by the online experience. Brooknerianism creeps up on you. You have a disposition, which the novels of Anita Brookner feed and nurture. One day you find yourself living the life you read about and dreamed about and feared, and really it is the only way to live. But if you shared that life with other Brooknerians, then it wouldn't be a Brooknerian life. Brooknerians are not always lonely. They're often, like the narrator of 'At the Hairdresser's', 'not lonely, except in company'. Ideal company is what is sought, and that's something that's hardly ever found outside the pages of a book. She is lonely, she says, for 'ideal company' – which is not quite the same as being lonely. 'I'm very good on my own. And I manage, I think, pretty well. But it tak...

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...

I was more than happy with my modest position in the library, which he seemed to think rebounded to his disadvantage. 'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 2 'At the Hairdresser's' is not the only e-text that hasn't been sufficiently proofread. One might expect the odd typo in, say, a free-of-charge public-domain e-book. But not in something from Penguin. I know I need not point out the howler in the quotation above. I am fairly certain the sentence is not as Anita Brookner wrote it.

Observer : Where do you think your ideas come from? Anita Brookner: I wish I knew. I'd tap into them straight away. I think it's mostly dreams and memories, isn't it, as with all novelists? […] Obs : Where will the next idea come from? AB: I don't know, that's the point. I have no control. I'm a great believer in unconscious processes. They usually work. Observer interview, 2001 ( Link ) Dreams are potent if mysterious motors in the novels, especially the later fiction. The Next Big Thing , Leaving Home and 'At the Hairdresser's' all begin with dreams. Information is received, considered, and not always found to be of use. Visitors ends with a dream, but it is a vouchsafement earlier in the novel - of a field of folk - that stays in the memory, lambent, puzzling. Brookner invokes not so much Piers Plowman as a Forties and Fifties heaven, a lost England, old decent values, kindness... Martin Amis, though not a Brooknerian, s...

James had three incarnations: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender. The novels of Anita Brookner (a writer who, at first glance, doesn't seem to 'develop' - to borrow a term from Larkin) fall perhaps into four phases. The four novels culminating in the Booker win ( A Start in Life , Providence , Look at Me and Hotel du Lac ) are sombre reads, solid, not starry, never presumptuous. Seemingly in receipt of dithyrambs for every subsequent effort, Brookner became in her second phase (beginning with Family and Friends ) a little - shall we say? - smug, a little complacent. Those novels of the mid to late Eighties feel over-assured, at times too ambitious. Brookner worked best in reaction against the prevailing culture. Critical opinion turned sour in the 1990s. Thus, with Brief Lives , begins her third phase. These are masterly books, Jamesian, the language as mandarin as James's, the themes unfashionable but enduring. The last phase comes i...