The Brooknerian

Read Trollope . For decent feelings, she said. In her own novels she references  He Knew He Was Right and Orley Farm . I'm not keen on either. I love the later works, not all of which are the gloomy old things of repute. I think the likes of Ayala's Angel are among my favourite novels of any writer. Read Roth and Updike . And the rest of the great American warhorses. Brookner always made a thing of her devotion to these most unBrooknerian writers. She was putting it on a bit, no doubt; but she made a good case. Read Wharton . Brookner made a case for Wharton too. But I'm not sure she was right. She said she thought of herself as much more like Wharton than James. Again, I don't think she was right. Read Sebald . She valued Sebald's sudden emergence, fully formed, on to the literary scene. She liked especially his evocation of old-style life and feelings. For much the same reason, read Mann . The bourgeois past, European angst - and Switzerland. Read Stendha...

Brookner tended to avoid conflict, not to say contact, with her literary peers, but Martin Amis expressed deep annoyance at her review of his novel Night Train . Brookner had written: It may be post-modem; it is certainly post-human. There are few facts that are without disclaimers, few acts that are unambiguous. To read it is to undergo a temporary brain dysfunction […] a narrative which sets out to celebrate the demotic but ends up so out of hand that it is experienced as an assault on the reader's good faith. Spectator , 26 September 1997 Brookner distrusted postmodernism ('Updike goes post-modern,' ( Spectator   27 February 1993) she commented uncertainly, in her review of Memories of the Ford Administration ). One hears less about postmodernism nowadays, but it was all the rage when I was young. And Brookner's postmodern novel? Surely Incidents in the Rue Laugier ? ...those few notations - ' Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. ...