The Brooknerian

The skill with which John Banville deploys Jamesian vocabulary and syntax in his recent James-inspired novel Mrs Osmond  (2017) is constantly stimulating and often brings a smile to the grateful reader's lips. It is the principle pleasure of the book. I'm interested by Banville's use of the word 'vastation', meaning spiritual emptying. Has he been reading Brookner? Brookner uses the word in her novel Visitors (1997) .  A character lies sunk in an armchair, as though subject to a 'Jamesian vastation'. In a review in 2005 of Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black , Banville refers to Mantel experiencing 'by her own account' a Jamesian vastation at the age of seven. I cannot date Mantel's account. But Henry James doesn't use the word (though in Notes of a Son and Brother we read of the author being 'vastated of my natural vigour'). ('Vastation' in fact derives from the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic to whose do...

The Custom of the Country (1913) isn't one of Wharton's novels of 'Old' New York. Forensically it depicts the twentieth-century world, and the reader is struck by just how modern it feels. Where in British novels of the time would one find such a reverence for celebrity, such an impulse towards instant communication, such a rejection of anything out of date? Where would one find characters called Indiana Frusk? Where would one find chewing-gum? Modern it might be, but it isn't modernist. It's told in steady deliberate sentences, heavy with irony, Jamesian in shape. You need to read the novel slowly, not because it is difficult to read, but because it seems too easy. You need to slow down, weighing each carefully deployed word. Wharton is both insider and outsider, and in this she resembles her disciple Anita Brookner who provides an Introduction to my Penguin edition. Brookner went through a Wharton 'phase' in the 1980s, and it's fun to spot in ...

The word is used three times in The Rules of Engagement . It might pass without notice were it not for the following, from some years later. In The Rules of Engagement 'blithe' describes the innocent, romantic Betsy. Here, in Brookner's  2009  Telegraph  interview  the word takes on more equivocal associations: In  Strangers  it is the tentative, introspective Sturgis who is confronted with the impulsive, carefree and monstrously self-obsessed Vicky Gardner, whose only interest in him is in what he can provide for her.  The person who thinks seriously about life, Brookner's books suggest, who proceeds cautiously and conscientiously, will be punished for their virtue, end up alone and dissatisfied, while the person who takes a wholly unreflecting and rather selfish view of life pays no price for it.  'But haven't you noticed that?'  She gives an amused smile. 'Think of Tony Blair. Unrealistic. Selfish. Happy as a clam!'  Didn't Pla...

I should be re-admitted if I exhibited all those marls of benign normality - holidays, dinner parties - that are the province of the maintained and protected... The Rules of Engagement , ch. 8 I've checked that sentence in both the printed first edition and the electronic version. Both show 'marls'. Surely 'marks' is meant? You don't really expect compositorial errors in a modern book, but it isn't the only example in Brookner. See an earlier post here .

'Just till tomorrow, dear. Then we're off home to our garden. We've had a lovely show this past year. Even the apples were good. Could you take a few home with you, Jane? I know Mary has sufficient. If you come by tomorrow, dear, we can let you have a couple of pounds with pleasure.' A Family Romance , ch. 8 Elsewhere the Scottish aunts speak of 'wee Marigold'. The word 'sufficient' recalls an earlier scene in which one or the other asks 'Have you had a sufficiency, Peter?' At one point Brookner examines the ladies' use of the verb 'to take', as in 'Will you take a scone, Jane?': 'their favourite verb, although no two people could have been more giving' (ch. 5). * 'Janet's copper beech. I confess to a little envy: I haven't one of my own. But I can always look at hers. We have tea together at her house, when it's at its best, in October. Have you noticed that when the leaves fall they turn a ...

regret > verb ( regretted , regretting ) [ with obj. ] feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity): she immediately regretted her words ¦  [ with clause ] I always regretted that I never trained.   [...]  archaic : feel sorrow for the loss or absence of (something pleasant): my home, when shall I cease to regret you! The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998 I've now and then noticed this about Brookner: her odd use of the verb to regret . I find it in Chapter 1 of A Friend from England (1987): ...Oscar sometimes regretted his little office and his box files... or this similar line from Chapter 3 of Strangers (2009): He regretted ... the structure of the working day. As you might imagine, I'm all in favour of  Brooknerese , but this is perhaps a step too far, especially as Brookner often and more frequently uses the more common meaning of regret . There are twenty-...

Rereading dredges up memories. Rereading Chapter 1 of A Friend from England , I was a student again and it was a sleepy afternoon in a lecture hall in the early 1990s. I attended a traditional university. English Literature meant Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. The canon crept tentatively into the twentieth century and finished in about 1950. There was a seminar called Contemporaneities, taking in Derrida, Lacan, et al , but it was after hours and considered rather daring. I went several times, and left baffled. But I remember a linguistics course I took, and one amazing session when our lecturer carried out a close reading of a Brookner passage. It was the paragraph in Chapter 1 of A Friend from England that runs from 'The house - a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa' to 'For she was daintily houseproud'. The lecturer (who is, I think, now a presenter on BBC Radio 4) wanted to show how Brookner communicated her sophisticated horror at the ...

adduce, adventitious, appurtenances, armature, at all events, avatar, beneficient, by dint of, canonical,  chevaleresque , claustration, complaisant, defile,  désinvolture , divagation, inadvertance, ineluctably, infraction, lycanthropic, martinet,  mise en abîme , moue, on one's dignity, otiose, oubliette, provisional, rebarbative, subfusc, suzerainty, temerity, unavailing