The Brooknerian

A Misalliance , disowned by Brookner, out of print for years in the UK, is a minor but significant novel. It might be called transitional. The character of Sally, feckless, sybaritic, entitled, is a preparation for the monsters to come: Julia in Brief Lives , Dolly in A Family Romance , both more fully realised. Blanche's marriage lays the ground similarly for those stories of marriage Brookner would tackle in later books: in Lewis Percy , in A Closed Eye , to name only two. A Misalliance is not to be lost. And it is very quotable. One seems to hear Brookner working out her very philosophy. The unease she felt at the National Gallery, the curious faintness that had overcome her at the sight of the archaic smile of the kouros in the Athens Museum, seemed to her an essential commentary on her own shortcomings. I could have saved my own life, she thought. But I was too weak, shackled by the wrong mythology. (Ch. 7)

I often had thoughts of retiring myself, but of course that was impossible at my age. A Friend from England , ch. 5 Rachel's retirement fantasies are indeed somewhat impossible, given that she's only in her early thirties, but the subject was probably on Brookner's mind in 1986, when presumably she wrote A Friend from England (1987). She would retire from the Courtauld at the age of sixty in 1988. We might ask ourselves about the post-retirement Brookners and whether there is any distinctiveness. I would guess Brookner's writing schedule made  Brief Lives (published 1990, almost certainly written in 1989) the first she wrote in 'the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea', as her 'About the Author' spiel put it in those years. Brief Lives, A Closed Eye, Fraud - indeed all the 1990s novels - have a new density, a new focus. There is a greater concentration on domestic, or at any rate on indoors life. There is a greater interest in ageing and on...

Traditional or progressive? Brookner is commonly described as the former. A study of Brookner's endings can be instructive in this regard. A number of her novels begin in a notional present and then move into the past. By the end the narrative has returned to the beginning. The ending isn't perhaps in a lot of doubt, though there may be shocks and surprises along the way. Falling Slowly is an example of this kind of novel. Others - A Private View , for example - are presented more chronologically. George Bland has his adventure, and at the end at least a version of the status quo is restored. At the sentence level, several of the novels attempt a moment of epiphany (e.g. Fraud ), often delivering a not always persuasive, or earned, sense of hope ( Leaving Home  ends like this). What we don't find, except possibly in Incidents in the Rue Laugier , is ( Middlemarch -style) a rundown of the Nachgeschichte , details of the various characters' ultimate fates. Aspe...

From the terse to the lyrical, Anita Brookner’s opening lines are often memorable. A Start in Life (1981) Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. With concision and aplomb Brookner sets out her stall. This is how to get yourself noticed. Brief Lives (1990) Julia died. I read it in The Times this morning. My French friend, Marie , never a Brookner fan, disliked Brief Lives , especially the opening; she objected to its bleakness and negativity. ‘Yes – and?’ I probably replied. It’s certainly a startling start to a novel, and if this almost gnomic line hasn’t found its way on to a T-shirt somewhere, then someone is missing a trick. Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early. A beautiful, rhythmic sentence, with Proustian resonances – and that second comma is surely the mark of a stylist (Brookner, in one of her book reviews, praises an author’s use of such a comma). O...

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.

Brookner has frequently been misread as a soft option, a wistful English lady writing short, tender, sorrowful novels a la Rosamond Lehmann, on broken hearts and lost loves. This is quite wrong. She is an obsessive, clinical, severely disenchanted writer. Hermione Lee, review  of A Friend from England , LA Times , 1988 I should like to focus today on Rosamond Lehmann, the dedicatee of Hotel du Lac . In Selina Hastings's 2002 biography of Lehmann, we learn that one of the most pleasurable consequences of Rosamond's late-flowering fame in the 1980s, following the inauguration of the Virago publishing house, was the personal friendships she formed as a result: with Carmen Callil 'whose generous and ebullient nature endeared her to Rosamond' and Anita Brookner, 'whose work Rosamond unreservedly admired - "my favourite novelist" - and of whom she became extremely fond'. Brookner, described by Hastings as 'elegant, fastidious, unusually perceptive...

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...