The Brooknerian

My thing with Brookner goes back exactly 25 years ago when Hotel du Lac won the Booker prize. To an aspiring literary critic, this frail, thin book about a frail, thin heroine coming to terms with loveless solitude at a Swiss hotel seemed the epitome of the bloodless, sexless, plotless English novel that had led us to study American literature at college.  Subsequently, one of the subjects for my debut appearance on the Radio 3 chatshow Critics' Forum turned out to be the latest Brookner, in which another west London spinster didn't quite get it together with a semi-comatose widower. What passed for a plot twist was the heroine experiencing a severe migraine. I have a memory of a moment when the central character was forced to return early from a stroll because the weight of the spectacle frames on her nose had become unbearable. Mark Lawson, Guardian , 2009 Mark Lawson's review of Brookner's 2009 novel Strangers isn't the only example of a critic recanti...

One or two of the critics who, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, trashed Brookner, came round to her in the end. Having been misunderstood as genteel and parochial, and bracketed with Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, Brookner's wider credentials, in the new century, were beginning to be appreciated. But it was too late. Critics began to speak of her as a European writer. Mark Lawson, on reading Strangers , penned a full recantation. He had been one of those young men in the 1980s who had so disdained the likes of A Misalliance and Lewis Percy . Now, older, he 'got' her at last, suggesting she be placed alongside no less a luminary than Samuel Beckett. High praise indeed. Link to Lawson review