The Brooknerian

A welcome arrival on YouTube: a recording of the 1984 Booker Prize dinner at which Anita Brookner learned of her win. Brookner's surprise is genuine; it was a strong year. The clip includes Julian Barnes (see last week's post) and Brookner's future biographer Hermione Lee.

Brookner's second novel, Providence , published in 1982, has several extended scenes set in Kitty Maule's tutorial room. For Kitty Maule read Anita Brookner, a lazy but inevitable parallel. The tutorials focus on a nineteenth-century French novel, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant, about a young man's affair with an older woman. Now in 2022 we add to the mix a third slim volume, Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes. Elizabeth Finch is a tutor, not in French literature (like Kitty Maule) or art history (Brookner) but in 'Culture and Civilisation'. The viewpoint in the tutorial room isn't Elizabeth/Kitty/Anita's, but rather a Julian Barnes substitute, a student named Neil who soon becomes fascinated by his inspirational teacher. Finch shares many of Brookner's peculiarities: her appearance, her clothes, her big eyes, her hair, her smoking, her voice, her diction, her handwriting, her high seriousness, her lunch habits (seventy-five minutes max.). Or rather she sha...

Although he set out to be a man of letters, he did not in fact write much until the active part of his life was over, and this of course is what sets him apart as a writer: he has the authority of a man whose preoccupations are not exclusively literary and who is informed at all times by memories of the immense experiences behind him. The Genius of the Future , 1971

For Christmases of the classic Brooknerian sort, one heads to Fraud (see here and here ) and A Family Romance ( here ). A later Brookner, The Rules of Engagement,  offers variations on the theme. ...her happy voice on the telephone, as she told me that she had been invited to the Fairlies on Christmas Day for lunch, or was it dinner? whatever that punitive meal was called... The narrator's own seasonal plans are at this point 'obstinately' shapeless, and later resolve into an organised walk with baffled Japanese students. In the narrator's, or Brookner's, hesitancy over what to call the Yuletide feast, one learns everything about her sense of exclusion - though here the narrator, unlike so many Brooknerians, is solidly English. In A Family Romance the celebratory meal is firmly 'lunch'. I'm not sure what I'd decide. The meanings, in England at least, of lunch, dinner, tea and supper are determined by class and slippery as eels. One plumps for one o...

When I arrived in the college, I had already moved about a good deal among the layers of society; and I had not come to the end of my journey yet. I had the luck to live intimately among half a dozen different vocations. Of all those I had the chance to see, the college was the place where men lived the least anxious, the most comforting, the freest lives.   This very nearly became a book of a few days. I'd never read C. P. Snow before, assuming him a bargain-basement Anthony Powell. The novel sequence Strangers and Brothers was always going to be compared with A Dance to the Music of Time . Snow's roman fleuve is less literary, flatter in tone, less continuous. One can dive in at any point, rather as with Trollope. The Trollope analogue is apposite: politics, in several arenas - here, those of a Cambridge college - are the novel's themes. More, Snow said he wanted to write as it were a nineteenth-century novel about the twentieth. But I was not immediately won over. The ...

Clowns do not make one laugh. Undersized, deliberately grotesque, on the verge of tears, they induce discomfort. Their function is to be humiliated, by powerful men and pretty girls, aided and abetted by the audience, and the process by which this is accomplished is a diabolical set-piece of collusion... We are supposed to identify with clowns because they appeal to the undersized innocents we all know ourselves to be. I suspect this process to be abominable. Brookner, Soundings , 'The Willing Victim' ( TLS review) Witness, there, in 1979, before a single novel was written, perhaps as neat an insight into the Brookner world as one is ever likely to find: think of Frances in Look at Me , trampled underfoot by the careless and effortless Frasers. Yet Frances is clear-eyed, though her knowledge is of little use. In an early interview Brookner said she felt sorry for her characters, poor things, and yet knew as little as they. '[T]he guileless unfortunate from whom nothing is r...

Objectively speaking, I was not too badly affected by Covid. I stayed out of hospital. I got better. But I had it before it was a common experience for many, and before vaccines were available; my system met the virus as it were innocently. A colleague who caught it at the same time, indeed in the same room, told me she'd ever afterwards been unable to concentrate on her reading. I ask myself now, nine months on, whether I've weathered similar doldrums. After Klara and the Sun and Dryden, mentioned in an earlier post, I reread The Bostonians , was admiring, but not enchanted. I tried reading Our Mutual Friend again, but found, as ever with Dickens, the higher-class scenes unpersuasive: my reading grew desultory, eventually broke down. I read some of a novel called Maxwell's Demon , till it got too postmodern even for me, and all of Martin Amis's The Zone of Interest , but more out of horrified fascination than any real appreciation. I read Kipling: Stalky and Puck of ...