The Brooknerian

Look in any British bookstore and you won't find it. In fact I don't think it's been in print in the UK since the 1980s. It was Brookner's sixth novel, published in 1986, and it was the first to receive a significant degree of negative press. The Paris Review interview tackled this with Brookner, who spoke out against the often personal nature of such criticism, but suggested  A Misalliance 'wasn't a very good book, but it wasn't that bad either. I've written it off'. It has remained in print in the States, where it enjoyed a more favourable reception. Its 'Jamesian' qualities were praised - 'which I would not have dared to presume'. It represents, perhaps, a turning point, and as the Paris Review exchange makes clear, the character of the protagonist is the main issue. The interviewer finds her boring and irritating; Brookner calls her 'aseptic'. There is certainly, from the off, a sense of authorial distance. Th...

I wish there were a word-count facility on my e-reader: it might yield some interesting results. I noticed during my recent reread of Fraud (1992) something I'd only half-recognised before: how Brookner's chapters have a tendency towards being extremely regular in length. I reckon if I were to count the words in each of Fraud' s chapters the results would be remarkably close. How did she do this? She wrote in longhand, and cleanly, with few corrections (a page of the MS of Family and Friends (1985) is to be found online alongside the Paris Review interview) - so it was probably just a case of her allocating herself a set number of sheets of paper per chapter. But why did she do it? She was certainly a writer, and probably a person, who lived according to her routines. Imposing such structures and patterns on the job of composition would have given momentum to a writing process that, as John Bayley says somewhere, possibly wasn't experienced at the full fever p...

Some notes on the seminar scene in chapter 4 of Brookner's Providence : Kitty's '[A] novel is not simply a confession, you know. It is about the author's choice of words' reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's line, 'I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in language, and with this I am obsessed.' When the Paris Review asked Brookner about Kitty's comment, she replied, 'I am not conscious of having a style. I write quite easily, without thinking about the words much but rather about what they want to say. I do think that respect for form is absolutely necessary in any art form - painting, writing, anything. I try to write as lucidly as possible. You might say lucidity is a conscious preoccupation.' The key quote from the Preface to the Third Edition of Constant's Adolphe , ' ce douloureux étonnement d'une âme trompée ' is given in the Penguin translation as 'the pain and bewilderment of a soul d...

Interviewer: Despite their subtlety and variations, all your books so far have been basically about love. Do you think you will go on writing about love? Brookner: What else is there? All the rest is mere literature! 1987 Paris Review interview Interviewer: Where do you see yourself in the tradition of English literature? Brookner: I don't know anything like that. I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.  2001 Observer interview 'You write about love,' says Mr Neville. 'And you will never write anything different, I suspect, until you begin to take a harder look at yourself.' Anita Brookner, in interview, purported to be on Edith's side, even to the extent of pretending she herself was Edith's kind of novelist. Yet in none of Edith Hope's novels would we find the sort of exchange that takes up much of chapter 7 of Hotel du Lac . The conversation is a deconstruction of the terms that underpin E...

'Are you a writer?' he enquired, in a voice very slightly tinged with amusement. Brookner is to be applauded for writing so rarely about writers. I can think of only a handful of writer-protagonists: Edith, here; Frances in Look at Me ; and Jane in A Family Romance . None is quite a Brooknerian artist. Edith is a romance novelist; Frances writes Barbara Pym-style comic short stories for the New Yorker ; and Jane is a children's writer. Brookner was ambivalent as to the attractions of a writing life. It was a penance for being unlucky, she said in Look at Me (chapter 6). Later, in interview , she said writing had reprieved her from the despair of living. In Hotel du Lac Edith's work is 'obscure and unnoticeable', though her 'labours' are said to 'anaesthetise' her. The Puseys are again a focus in chapter 4, and a note of seriousness is gestured towards. Their presumed ages are getting steadily higher; and 'in a way she could not define...

Rachel, an 'extremely emancipated young woman', as Brookner told the  Paris Review  - and a young woman 'whom they will not be able to think is me!' - seems at first glance an experiment with a new, unfamiliar and possibly unsympathetic character. She's emotionally cold, sexually liberated, ruthless in her 'sensible arrangements', and is spoken of as a feminist. At the time many critics saw Rachel as unBrooknerian, at any rate 'an extreme case in the Brookner hospital', according to Hermione Lee . But knowing the complete oeuvre, we may think differently now. Rachel is atypical only if you don't know your Brookner, if you credit too far Brookner's often disingenuous, stagy pronouncements in the various interviews, and if you think Brookner's some kind of super-sophisticated Barbara Pym. In fact there's nothing unusual about the narrator of A Friend from England . She's Zoe, she's Emma, she's George Bland. In chapter 5, f...

He remembered asking directions of an elderly man once in Paris, to be met with the words, 'Monsieur, il ne faut pas partir d'ici.'* That was the nub of the matter, a false start... Strangers , Ch. 7 One listens closely for echoes as one reads Brookner's last novel,  Strangers . The elderly Parisian and his repressive reply crop up more than once in the novel, and return one to the beginning and to an early interview: My own life was disappointing - I was  mal partie, started on the wrong footing; so I am trying to edit the whole thing. Paris Review *I must apologise for making a hash of the quote in earlier versions of this post. I'm not a good French speaker.

The Romantic notion ... is that life is so horrible that it is the artistic duty of a man of higher sensibility to spurn its vulgar attractions, to subvert its possibilities, and in general to get it over and done with, making as few concessions to normality as possible. 'Art' (and the word is baleful in this context since it adds a spurious nobility to the process of avoiding Nature) will be the goal of the life-hater. Writing may thus be seen as a form of conversion hysteria. 'Sick Servants of the Quill' (1981), Soundings It was the sad and desperate determination of Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Maupassant and Daudet to regard the act of writing as the justification of an otherwise unlived life. This it was. But they did not believe, as so many non-writers believe, that writing was a therapeutic exercise. Ibid. Haffenden: You make your novels sound like a sort of self-therapy. Brookner: Well, if it were therapy I wish it had worked. It doesn'...

Was Anita Brookner an Existentialist? As a young woman in Paris in the 1950s she must often have seen the principle actors. In her fiction she takes Existentialist positions, more than once adapting for her own purposes a famous proto-Existentialist line from the nineteenth century: 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.' 'And my own recovery? That, I feared, would have to be postponed indefinitely. It would be safer, and wiser, to assume an endless vigilance,' says Zoe in The Bay of Angels at one of her lowest points. Providence is the novel that explores Existentialism most blatantly. Brookner discusses the novel and the movement at length in the  Paris Review interview : INTERVIEWER All your heroines follow 'an inexorable progress toward further loneliness,' as you say of Kitty Maule in  Providence . It seems to me very deterministic. Is there nothing we can do to alter our fate? BROOKNER I think one’s character and predisposition determine one’s f...

George Eliot is disturbed and embarrassed by 'The Lifted Veil'. In a letter to John Blackwood, she describes it as 'a slight story of an outr é kind - not a jeu d'esprit but a jeu de mélancolie '. And Eliot's struggle for control over the material of 'The Lifted Veil' manifests itself both within the tale in the narrator's repeated apologies for going on at such length, and externally when Eliot returns, fourteen years later, to preface the tale with a new epigraph which resolves some of its more disturbing ambiguities. Yet the experience proves cathartic, allowing Eliot to move on to the masterpiece of Middlemarch . John Lyon, Introduction to the Penguin edition of The Sacred Fount by Henry James  Shusha Guppy: Do you ever rewrite what you have written? Brookner: Never. It is always the first draft. I may alter the last chapter; I may lengthen it. Only because I get very tired at the end of a book and tend to rush and go too quickly, so ...

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...

To remain pure a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation. Paris Review interview