The Brooknerian

'I'm rather tired, my dear,' said Toni, playing the old lady card. Suddenly she could not wait to get home. A Family Romance , ch. 3 It is always amusing to catch Anita Brookner reusing material. Take this, from the  1994 Independent interview : It pleases me to play the old lady card. It's quite useful at times. But if it were true, it wouldn't be a card, would it? I'd be a poor thing. I'd feel sorry for myself. Which I don't think I do.

Old age is the great unwritten subject. Let me specify. Novels about old age, written by old people, are rare. Great writers of the past either didn't write about old age, or included old people as peripheral figures, or were young themselves when they wrote about the old, or wrote about 'old' people we wouldn't now consider as such. To take a few disparate examples: Trollope's 'old man' in An Old Man's Love is only fifty; Lear was written by a man in his forties; Vita Sackville-West wrote All Passion Spent * when she was thirty-eight. Authentic depictions of old age in present-day literature are increasing, but remain novelties. One thinks of Diana Athill's memoirs or Clive James's late poems. Then there is Anita Brookner. We had intimations in A Private View , Visitors and The Next Big Thing , but Strangers and, especially, 'At the Hairdresser's' are Brookner's plainest examples. The story of Elizabeth Warner, her fear and vu...