The Brooknerian

Further to earlier posts ( here and here ) on Brookner's writing style, I note a review from 2009 of Strangers in the Oxford Mail (see here ): Since the perfection of her grammar and use of language is a subject often commented on by reviewers ('Brookner’s writing is meticulous, impeccable and full of simple grace,'  Sunday Times ) I cannot resist pointing out that on the evidence of Strangers she does not know the meaning of either ‘dilemma’ (page 25) or ‘fulsome’ (pages 37 and 44). I would also suggest there is an otiose comma in her brief author’s note: 'All the characters in this novel are imaginary. But I do not doubt that somewhere, out there, they, or others like them, exist.' Dilemma There are five examples of the word in Strangers (none of them on p. 25 of the British edition). The reviewer's complaint appears to centre on Brookner's use of the word to mean 'difficult situation or problem' rather than 'a situation in which a choice must...

Shortly after Anita Brookner's death, Penguin reissued most of her novels with new covers. Most, but not all. Two novels from the 1980s, A Friend from England and A Misalliance , were missing, but they had been out of print for some decades. I don't know why exactly - except that in an interview in the 2000s Brookner described her early novels as 'crap', and also that she said disparaging things at least about A Misalliance at the time of its publication. But from the 2016 reissue there were several surprising absences. Where was Leaving Home , or Visitors ? Visitors (1997), in particular, has always been considered very highly. 'Almost certainly a masterpiece' - as Brookner once said of another author's novel. I notice similar things happening to the likes of Kingsley Amis. His novels, following a period of neglect after his death in the 1990s, have been reissued under the Vintage label: period classics. But not everything is there. I don't find ...

With the award of the Booker Prize [for The Old Devils ] and a knighthood in 1990, Sir Kingsley Amis was set up to become a grand old man of English letters, but his last years were not serene. He developed a 'late style' which was almost as syntactically intricate as Henry James's, but without the latter's compensatory poetic eloquence or the wit of his own earlier novels... [...] In an obituary of him I said that Kingsley Amis's vision was in its way as bleak as Samuel Beckett's, but cushioned and concealed by the conventions of the well-made novel. David Lodge, Lives in Writing (2014) Lodge adds a caveat to the last remark to the effect that he meant only Amis's later novels were as bleak as Beckett's. As for the bit about Amis's 'late style', Lodge disappointingly doesn't exemplify - in part I suspect because the observation is an impression rather than anything easily demonstrable. But Lodge's comments interest me as I...

Who writes letters now? I did, in my analogue youth. I was, I guess, playing at being grown up, because writing letters was what grown-ups did. I even had a pen-pal, Marie Delemotte, mention of whom has been previously made. (I was with her in London in 1992 on the day I met Anita Brookner - see 'A Fraudulent Encounter' .) Brookner characters write letters - long, highly emotional letters they either later regret or do not send. We get to see them in all their horror, get to witness at close quarters the collapse of the Brooknerian reserve. They're terrifying performances. No one would want to receive such letters. There's one, a comparatively short one, in chapter 7 of Altered States , and the valediction gives something of its flavour: 'I am yours devotedly, in spite of, or rather because of, everything, Alan.' With the publication of the letters of Philip Larkin and later of Kingsley Amis (both born in 1922), critics suggested the age of literary correspo...

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...