[The following review of Lewis Percy was written by a South Australian for the blog Bibliolathas.]

He was disgusted with himself, with his life. He was also confused. Why had it been his lot to become involved with such implacable women? He had looked to women for mercy, not for conflict. Since his earliest days he had thought of women as kindly creatures, benevolent, well-disposed. This had apparently been all wrong.

Paris. A student. An intense mother-child relationship. The London suburbs. An emotional half-life spent in libraries, taking the safest option. Ah, we say – an Anita Brookner novel. Indeed. But this one has a twist, for our quiet, timid, repressed protagonist is male. I am almost sure that I haven’t encountered a Brookner with a male protagonist in the dozen or so I’ve read. Are there others?

It is 1959 and the twenty-two year old Lewis Percy is a graduate student working on his PhD in Paris. Lewis Percy is a self-centred only-child, raised from an early age solely by his widowed mother. He rooms in an apartment in the Avenue Kléber in Paris, in a household of women. When he’s at home in suburban London, he lives with his mother. The subject of his dissertation – quietly integral to the irony and humour of Brookner’s book – is heroism in the nineteenth century novel.

Lewis Percy is a novel about a man finding his feet as a man. He is offered stereotypes of masculinity: his gay best friend with an antique-dealer boyfriend (BTW, how many gay characters are there in Brookner?); his womanizing hypermasculine trend-chasing boss; the successful wealthy American academic with trophy wife (a nod – or a wink – to David Lodge here?); and, not least of all, the heroic male subjects of his research.

But Lewis Percy is also (and I suspect that I mean “really”) a novel about women. Women dominate every aspect of Lewis Percy’s existence and a full range of ‘types’ are presented to the reader: the saintly mother; the suffering virgin student flatmate from Paris; the hearty single professional girl flatmate whose answer to every problem is “Faites de la gymnastique ou faites-vous baiser” (a paler blue translation might be ‘Work out or make out’); Miss Clarke at the library growing old and blowsy as she seeks a rascal to mother; the slatternly cleaning lady; the cousin’s boorish wife (with her “necklace, of even smaller pearls… too modest to be anything but real” [Ouch!], “the type of wife who would collect her husband from the station, not out of her desire to see him, but so that he should not deviate on the way home to her”); the agoraphobic wife who discovers women’s liberation but retains the virginal aloofness of the lady in the Unicorn Tapestry; the swinging singleton who destroys Lewis Percy’s marriage (“a genuinely amoral woman, although he understood that they were not called that any more”); the daughter whom he wants to name Dorothea Brooke (a neat Brookner joke); his wife’s Sphinx-like mother (a “red-lipped smouldering creature” brilliantly described as the “Messalina of the suburbs”) who has given her best years – and respectability – to a man who won’t reciprocate.

Brookner plays with great success with a number of her usual tropes in Lewis Percy. There were a couple of places where I was almost moved to wonder whether – heresy! – she was having a bit of a leg-pull with her own generic signifiers: the libraries; the lonely women; women’s books; even the London through which her hero unwearily tramps. One specific example of this playfulness is the book’s references to ‘women’s fiction’/’women’s novels’. When Lewis Percy’s book-loving mother dies, leaving him alone (and, more importantly, helpless without someone to deal with the mundane day-to-day domestic drudgeries), he revisits the library she loved and borrows the types of books she loved to read: the Elizabeth Bowens and Margaret Kennedys. The allusions to these books slip so easily from playful to denigratory:

He found himself drawn to the books his mother loved, as if reading them he could get in touch with her in a way of which she would have approved. In any event such reading seemed to him salutary. He began to think that his official reading, which involved him in grown-up theories about heroism, and nineteenth-century heroism at that, might have led him, not exactly astray, but perhaps a little too far from normal concerns.

Brookner, of course, is an heir of these women’s novels, so it is somewhat amusing that her hero soon finds that “he had felt a certain distaste for all those women’s novels with which he had comforted himself, and was at present immersed in The Eustace Diamonds.”

Lewis Percy – the man – has two fundamental problems. First, he perceives gaining the sort of woman who would enable him to attain domestic bliss as a quest along the lines of his heroic “official reading”. Perhaps as a consequence too of the “climate of femininity” in which he was raised he must, he thinks, swoop down and rescue a woman and make her his own. Only then will he be granted a reward: the losing his virginity and the gaining of a clean house.

Certainly his two earliest attractions are to women who fit a type that requires rescuing: Cynthia in Paris with her “kind of invalid sex-appeal”, and the pale, repressed Tissy in his local library. When he carries his “quest” out – rescuing the agoraphobic librarian Tissy from her mother – we can already see disaster looming. He then compounds his problems by acting honourably (heroically: “faithfully but joylessly”) when the enticing Emmy attempts to seduce him away from the satisfactory but colourless wife he compares to a fastidious automaton, a kind of unfulfilling Stepford Wife who leaves his dinner “on a plate in the oven, like a message in a tomb” and who regards the time spent on the book he is writing as a kind of infidelity to her own home-making.

Second, despite what he would perceive as his empathy towards and, indeed, liking for women – “a congenial and compassionate sex” – he does not in the least understand them:
It was all easier in books, he thought, especially in books written by women. They knew their feelings so well. He was more than ever unsure of his. Again:

He was aware that he loved women in general too much to hurt them, and that his mother’s stricture – ‘I don’t think we want to be unkind, do we, Lewis?’ – would always inhibit him from the measure of decisiveness that might be conclusive. And he was also aware that to offer a woman sympathy was not always an heroic tactic. Yet what he felt for women was precisely a kind of yearning sympathy, rather than anything bolder or more straightforward.

But you can’t learn everything about life from books, can you? Even if you are writing a book that champions the archetypal male hero?(Oh the lovely, lovely irony).

‘You fantasize too much. You’ve probably read too much.’

‘Yes, I have. I see that. I’ve had unrealistic ideas, antiquated notions. All wrong – I see that too. But were the ideas wrong? Or did I just misapply them?’

Life requires living: “Sometimes he wanted to leave the library and run for his life.” What happens when you decide no longer to take the path of least resistance? As we have come to expect from a Brookner heroine hero, Lewis Percy must make a stand and be a man when the critical moment arrives. Can Lewis Percy change his life and escape the Brooknerish fate of each day being “another unmomentous day”?

(That phrase so brilliant captures the Brookner aesthetic, doesn’t it? Elsewhere Lewis Percy notes, of an afternoon’s tentative courtship, that “he did not see how much time had passed when so little had happened.” Again, this is almost a summary of the Brookner corpus and reflects a quite self-reflexive bent in this book; indeed, Lewis Percy thrice refers to himself in terms of a character in a book).

Lewis Percy is a book about becoming a man without losing the ideals of a hero. I very much enjoyed it. I thought it offered a different way of looking at a typical Brookner character list. I found its in-jokes on its own genre quite delightful. It was also, as always, beautifully written. Brookner can sum up the entire ‘class’ characteristics of a room or a person with a mere handful of words. It was all quite charming in that monstrously sad Brookner way. Then again, I sometimes suspect that I would be affronted to find happiness in an Anita Brookner novel.

For what had his youth yielded, apart from a modest ambition and a mistaken confidence in women?

How do I rate it among other Anita Brookner novels? Right up there with my favourites, Hotel du Lac, A Start in Life, and Fraud.

[When we first thought about having an International Anita Brookner Day, the first thing I thought was that Peta Mayer had to be involved. Mayer is an author and Brookner scholar in Australia who graciously agreed to write something special for the IABD blog.]

While reflecting on this topic, I was reminded of Brookner’s own comments about expectations, offered in an interview in 1985. ‘I do envy those who can take life a little more easily,’ she said: ‘I am too handicapped by expectations.’ The novelist’s words suggest, then, that she might disapprove of this list; literary expectations in one way being the evil stepmother of the contemporary ‘spoiler’ (and expect a few mild spoilers in the list to follow). In Brookner’s case I think she meant that, like most people, she expected to get married and have children – and therefore to act a certain way – when in reality a completely different and magnificent life presented itself. Brookner’s early expectations not only occluded her ability to recognise the life unfolding, they also became embedded in her personality and thereafter determined a negative response to her emerging reality. ‘I find the moral position of many modern novels faintly ridiculous, as if you can start editing your life halfway through it and do something you’ve never done before and which you’re unprepared for anyway. I don’t think that’s feasible,’ she told Hermione Lee in her only ever televised interview, also in 1985. But another piece of Brookner wisdom also springs to mind in this context, and it’s a theme that resurfaces time and again in her fiction. ‘The worse thing in life is not knowing what is going on’ she told a reviewer in The Times in 1983. Similarly, a character’s discovery that she’s been acting in the dark is not an unusual denouement in the Brookner narrative and has incited more than one critic to accuse her of sadism. But what do the critics know?!

I first started reading Brookner in the late 90s. My mother handed me Visitors (1997) when I went to stay at her house with a boyfriend. I read the book then and there in one sitting (its theme of obnoxious houseguests was perhaps prophetic). I thought the book was hilarious and I immediately became obsessed with the author and her reception. I couldn’t understand why Brookner was so underrated and I dedicated the next ten years of my life to researching this very pressing issue. But now it seems she is enjoying a renaissance…The list below represents my own injunction to entertain a life spent in the grip of this highly-affecting novelist.  

1. Expect to laugh
2. Expect an aesthetic experience
3. Walking
4. Food
5. Expect to see a reflection of yourself
6. Eros
7. Expect reading to be dangerous
8. Zeitgeist
9. Freud
10. Henry James

[The following is part of Peta Mayer’s 10 Things to Expect From a Brookner Novel.]

In the opening chapter of Fraud (1992), Brookner’s twelfth of twenty-four novels, two policemen attend the rooms of Dr Lawrence Halliday after he reports the uncharacteristic absence of a patient, Miss Anna Durrant. A notebook is produced and the doctor questioned.

‘Was she very dependent on you, Sir?’
He shrugged. ‘She may have been.’
‘In love, perhaps?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘And you, Sir. Were you attracted to her?’
‘Good God, Inspector! She was a woman of fifty!

For the younger officer (age twenty-nine) this response is enough to exculpate Halliday (age forty-eight) from any nefarious involvement. Reassuring the doctor that ‘women disappear all the time,’ the officers move their investigation to the flat of Anna’s acquaintance, eighty-one year old Mrs Marsh.

‘Inspector Maigret!’ Mrs Marsh greets the officers, proceeding to inform them of her relief at Anna’s disappearance, a woman whom she declares is highly irritating, hopeless around men, gratingly perfect, divorced from the real world and worst of all – tactless. Noting Mrs Marsh’s use of the word ‘whom,’ the older officer concludes she is a reliable witness. Old-fashioned, unmarried and childless, the police diagnose Anna as a ‘typical spinster.’ A new problem emerges however. ‘There aren’t any spinsters any more, Barry’, the officer remarks: ‘They’re all up there at the cutting edge. I blame Joan Collins.’

Written when Brookner was sixty-four, Fraud is one of her funniest novels and it travels along so lightly as to seem like it was effortless to write. Only nine pages in and satire already infuses her characterisation of age, sexuality, the legal system, gender, relationships, the single woman and popular culture. In Fraud, as in Brookner’s other novels, the archetypal hero or narrator ‘the Brooknerine’ (male or female) is an intelligent outsider whose discreet observations expose the hypocrisies and contradictions of those with social and cultural status while objectifying the flaws and self-deceptions of the human character. Funny… or depressing? I guess that depends on your own expectations of the world, the writer and what you do with the information Brookner imparts.

In 1985, Brookner spoke about her reputation for writing ‘depressing’ novels.

My books differ [from romance novels] in the sense that they’re more realistic – things don’t work out. They’re more fragmented. There is no safe conclusion. They’ve been called very depressing. But anyone who has had unhappy experiences won’t find them depressing. Life is depressing if you’re too frightened of it. The thing is not to be too frightened.

In England, they say, ‘Why do you write such depressing books? You poor thing, if that’s all you’ve got to write about’. [The English] are a high-spirited and ungracious people. Foreigners always saw them like that in the nineteenth century. They haven’t changed. And I speak as a semi-outsider.

Brookner’s interviews are in fact a great source of the author’s irony and indicative of how she transgresses the cultural injunction that, as she put it in 1983, ‘lady writers are meant to be cute’. In this 2001 interview, Brookner, known for being unusually polite, was uncharacteristically ruthless in response to a series of unimaginative questions from the Observer’s Robert McCrum.

Observer: [The Bay of Angels] is your twentieth novel in about 20 years. Is that how you like to work – at the rate of a novel a year?
Anita Brookner: I’d like to be writing all the time, but that’s not possible.
Obs: Why not?
AB: Lack of ideas, I suppose.

Obs: You’ve been very successful for a late starter.
AB: I wouldn’t say that. I’m not very popular, because they’re bleak and they’re mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I’m only writing fiction. I’m not making munitions, so I think it’s acceptable.

Obs: Are your books, in some sense, your children?
AB: No. Not at all.

Obs: So you’ve now finished the book, and you’re a free woman?
AB: Very boring.
Obs: You’re bored?
AB: Oh terribly.

A great thing about Brookner’s voice in this interview, apart from the way she refuses to romanticise writing, is how she satirises her stereotype as ‘boring.’ A popular criticism of Brookner is that she writes boring novels about boring people; a judgment which stems partly from a reluctance to read women’s writing figuratively. Irony breaks up the deterministic force of literal meaning in a text. When read ironically, ‘boring’ doesn’t always mean ‘boring.’ It can mean ‘sexually restless’ or ‘sexually charged’. It can be about subverting the idea of what is culturally interesting or acceptable, when what is interesting too often equates to a media story about Brangelina or Kate Middleton. ‘Boring’ can refer to a type of social or class privilege. It can signify ennui,an emotional and intellectual condition brought about by industrial capitalism. Boredom might operate in a similar way as Oscar Wilde’s proposition that ‘all art is useless.’ In Wilde’s aesthetic manifesto, the idea of having function, and therefore of not being bored or aimless, implied conformity to the mainstream, bourgeois, rationalist ideology. Therefore, to sign ‘boredom’ was a potentially radical act.

My point is that if you think you’re bored reading Brookner, you’re probably really rolling around the floor laughing. No, not really. My point is that Brookner should not always be read seriously.

The funniest Brookners:
A Misalliance (1986)
Hotel du Lac (1984)
Fraud (1992)
Visitors (1997)
Falling Slowly (1998) (also very sad)
A Friend from England (1987)(kind of weird)
Undue Influence (1999)

[The following is part of Peta Mayer’s 10 Things to Expect From a Brookner Novel.]

Brookner’s novels transport the reader to a world in which the inner life is a treasured companion, resource and guide. ‘Introspection,’ Brookner remarks in her biographical studies of nineteenth-century French art critics, Romanticism and its Discontents, ‘is the fallen creature’s guiding light.’ Through a subtle yet potent and idiosyncratic mix of subject matter, character and writing style, the Brookner novel attributes to the individual the power to register and craft an aesthetic response to the everyday. In doing so, Brookner implies that the aesthetic has a political and ethical capacity: insofar as the aesthetic response is not just a reaction, what might it say? How might it look? What meaning can be construed from the aesthetic experience? And how does that meaning help us interpret what we are generally told is true? In Brookner, form (aka aesthetics) is paramount. ‘It’s form and style and standards of behaviour that are going to save us all. Once we abandon any kind of obligation to behave well or to present ourselves in a good light, then I think it’s the jungle.’ Without wanting to sound too Ayn Rand-like, the privileging of aesthetics in Brookner attributes the Brooknerine with a particular type of subversive power.

Brookner’s fiction is at once light and deep, soft and broad. There’s something spare and efficient about a soft-cover Brookner (always around 210 pages) which is in itself, easily transportable. The simple structure of the Brookner text is complemented by her ability to render a sensual experience. You might read of a pyramid of oozing plums, already spoiling, moist, blackish pink, overripe, releasing their fragrance in a market in the South of France, or smell the delicate steam of a soup scenting a kitchen with the fragrance of the greenhouse, of wet grass, while the sun breaks through to shine on rain-spotted windows. You might have your attention drawn  through the window to a tiny silver plane as a point of brilliance in a cloudless light blue sky, or, indeed, to a plate with its traces of marmalade which doubles now as an astray. Brookner’s eye for detail is extraordinary and compassionate and inspiring. Her novels represent a l’invitation au voyage, not only for access they enable to fictional worlds and alternative experiences, but for the effortless way in which they facilitate self-knowledge and a greater understanding of human behaviour.

Brookner identifies as both an outsider and as a teacher. ‘My real work was as a teacher and an academic, and I loved it. This is really just filling the time’ she commented on novel-writing in 2009. While academics are notoriously bad novelists, it is interesting to consider Brookner’s very undidactic form of knowledge-sharing, in conjunction with her elegant aesthetics, in light of the fact her first career was an academic French Romantic art historian. Examples of Brookner’s art criticism can be found in Romanticism and its Discontents, which includes studies of green-haired poet, Charles Baudelaire, and neurotic civil servant, Karl-Joris Huysmans. Her collection of review essays, Soundings, is also a great exposition of her original voice, largely empathetic and faintly sarcastic. Among other things it features a great tale about the murdering mistress of the man who invented the Scarsdale diet and another about Rosa Bonheur, horse-painter extraordinaire, whose rediscovery Brookner contextualises with the insight that ‘nostalgia for idealised simplicity is one of the oldest vices of a civilised society.’ Brookner’s criticism is accessible and entertaining and makes an excellent reading companion alongside her fiction. 

In the 1990s, The Simpsons was considered the canonical ‘intertexual’ form for the way it referenced multiple other texts. Brookner is better. Never overwhelming, her references to art and literature change and develop throughout her fiction. Her first novel A Start in Life (1981) was, like many first novels, thought to be autobiographical. But this interpretation is complicated once you realise that its title also makes a reference to a Balzac novelette of the same name Un Debut dans la vie – especially in light of the fact that the heroine of Brookner’s novel is a Balzac literary critic. In her later novels, Brookner’s intertextual strategies transform into a more subtle and allusive practice and constitute a veritable archive of surprises for the well-read or interested.

Throughout the novels, Brooknerines remain habitual attendants of London’s galleries and museums and this patronage enables Brookner to reference particular works of art. The Brooknerine’s relationship with the National Gallery, The Wallace Collection, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert etc etc are familiar to anyone who’s ever wandered around a gallery alone. ‘She did not expect art to console her,’ explains the narrator of main protagonist, Blanche Vernon, in A Misalliance: ‘Why should it? It may be that there is no consolation. But, like most people, she did expect it to take her out of herself, and was constantly surprised when it returned her to herself with no comment.’ While Brookner might occasionally strike a utilitarian pose about the capacity of art, she is also a Romantic who uses the symbols of art to create unexpected effects in her writing. In A Misalliance, Blanche’s attendance on the National Gallery becomes so obsessive that her sister-in-law implores her to stop going. What is so captivating about the nymphs of Italian Renaissance painting? In A Friend from England (1987), Rachel Kennedy has an epiphany in front of Giorgione’s Tempest at l’Accademia in Venice. Why this painting? Miriam Sharpe’s day is arrested by her sighting of Eugene Laloue’s ‘Place du Chatelet under snow’ in a Duke St gallery window on her way to work in the London Library. And in Undue Influence (1999), Claire Pitt meets her best friend in front of Paul Delaroche’s ‘The Execution of Lady Jane Grey.’ What does it mean? In all these novels, Brooknerines themselves are initiated through different types of aesthetic experiences which Brookner leaves open-ended. It is up to the reader to determine the significance of these experiences both for him or herself and for the character in the novel.

[The following is part of Peta Mayer’s 10 Things to Expect From a Brookner Novel.]

Stendhal described novel-writing as walking with a mirror. The flâneur is the archetypal modern walker, the traveling artist-poet observing the multiple sites and sounds of the urban metropolis. For Baudelaire, the flâneur is a ‘passionate spectator’ for whom ‘it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.’ Writers make good flâneurs insofar as they are solitary figures who are at the same time fascinated by human behaviour.  

‘I have thought about leaving England, but I am a recluse,’ Brookner commented in 1985: ‘It doesn’t really matter where I live, because I’m indoors most of the time, I like solitary walks in cities – yes – I love that.’ Brooknerines are flâneurs. They mostly walk the streets of inner London but they walk Paris, the South of France and Venice too. They walk to process emotion; to leave silent living-rooms; they walk to work or without a destination; they walk to the shops, to cafes, to galleries. Occasionally they might walk out to dinner. They don’t walk to parties.

In Undue Influence (1999) Claire Pitt walks from her flat in Montague Mansions to her work at a bookshop in Gower St, London’s famous literary district. Her job entails editing a manuscript entitled ‘Walks with Myself,’ a text she finds disappointingly dull until she unearths its scandalous history. Similarly, Claire’s walks through the cathedral cities of France are opportunities for her own sexual adventures, so walking assumes a subtext of illicit desire. At the novel’s denouement, Claire’s walking forces her to confront a reality which incessant her imagining has previously encouraged her to deny.

Brief Lives (1990) is another great Brookner walker narrative. ‘I would escape from the house, which I hated, and take long walks,’ recalls the narrator, Fay Dodworth. (Note: Fay Dodworth = ‘faded worth.’ Brookner is also a doyenne of the realist convention of totemistic naming.) Through her walks around town, Fay’s narrative maps the local environs of Kensington and Chelsea in London’s west, referencing the residences of major and minor characters in Onslow Square, Sloane Ave, Hanover Sq, Swan Court, Chelsea Manor St, Gertrude St, Foubert’s Place, Egerton Crescent, Drayton Gardens, Great Portland St, Baron’s Court and Lowndes Sq. As a citizen of the consumer class, Fay is processed through Harrods, Selfridges, Peter Jones, Regent St, Fulham St, Harley St, South Kensington Station, the Kensington Library, the Soane Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Science Museum. Yet, like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, these sites are not uninvested in personal/political history and memory and reflect a variety of private experiences. The streets and shops and parks and galleries of Brookner’s novels locate the text in contemporary time and space and therefore provide an interesting contrast to multiple references to the nineteenth century in the narrative. As traces of the city summoned in the glimpse of the passerby, they also symbolise the transient and ephemeral nature of modern life so recorded by Baudelaire and the nineteenth-century aesthetes.

On a research trip to London, I mapped Undue Influence and Brief Lives for a forthcoming publication (due 2012). You can view the photos of the main sites of Undue Influence at this flickr site.  

[The following is part of Peta Mayer’s 10 Things to Expect From a Brookner Novel.]

Brooknerines are ‘mildly anorexic’ – according to Fraud’s Dr Halliday, that is. While it’s true that you’ll never catch a Brooknerine eating trifle out of the fridge at midnight, Brookner’s novels evince a fascination with food. There is food as family memory and ritual: ‘the faintly sour flavours of the buttermilk, rye bread, caraway seeds, cucumbers’ of Ruth’s grandmother in A Start in Life or the ‘vigorous and haphazard cooking’ of Kitty’s Papa in Providence (1982). There is food as character signifier: you might consider Lizzie Peckham as an empty carton of low-fat yoghurt in A Closed Eye (1991),or Blanche Vernon as ‘a single Dover sole’ in A Misalliance or the sphinx-like bulimic Monica as a plate of cakes in Hotel du Lac (1984). Blanche also has a collection of fine wines on offer: Vouvray, Sancerre, Malaga, Muscadet, Mersault, Sauternes, Liebfraumilch, which, at times, may substitute for more solid options. In Falling Slowly (1998), Miriam’s catering is geared to the appetites of her lover Simon and include asparagus quiche, smoked salmon, Pain de campagne, Boursin and the first Cox’s.

In Brief Lives, Fay Dodworth’s impeccable menus on occasion manage to distract Julia Morton from her diet of omelettes and whiskey. Fay seduces with a ‘careful’ casserole of chicken and peppers, followed by lemon mousse and coconut tuiles; little parcels of cold salmon, of tongue, of fruit tart and hothouse peach and madiera cake; vegetable terrine, baked chicken and rice, fresh rolls and a slither of Stilton; cold veal with a tunny sauce and strawberry tart; a simple salad of tomatoes, basil and olives, drizzled with oil, cold curried chicken and fruit salad; rice salad and sherry and seed cake. Specialised modes of consumption are integral to the practice of elegant living and are complicit in the soft infusion of glamour throughout Brookner’s novels.

[The following is part of Peta Mayer’s 10 Things to Expect From a Brookner Novel.]

I once read a criticism of Brookner to the effect that her characters were unemotional. I don’t know if the critic was especially suicidal at the time, or perhaps channelled intense feeling into sport, but I was under the impression that the Brooknerine’s relatively quiet public life reflected immense internal activity; an ongoing dialogue between the emotions and the intellect. Precisely because the Brooknerine is not running for public office, her survival is based on a highly intuitive and observant interplay with the mainstream culture. With a sentimental education, the Brookner protagonist elicits information primarily from her emotions and from art and literature. In fact, insofar as ‘plotlessness’ (also a marker of the avant-garde novel) constitutes another criticism of the Brookner text, it could be argued that, in lieu of plot, Brookner’s novels are propelled primarily by pathos and constitute a veritable narrative of the emotions.

In Romanticism and its Discontents, Brookner writes that ‘infinite longing’ characterised the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, remarkable for producing ‘an organically connected number of resounding masterpieces in a relatively short space of time.’ Following the death of God in the Enlightenment, the death of Reason in the French Revolution, and loss to a traditional enemy in the Battle of Waterloo, les citoyens of France were feeling anxious. It was the mal du siecle from which the figure of the Artist was born; the personae whose reputation for genius and madness still pertains today. This suffering, self-examining figure cultivated experiences either real or imaginary in order to produce a range of idiosyncratic emotional responses which stimulated artistic expression. Through recourse predominantly to the emotions, the artist became a symptom of the culture and aimed to make the historical malaise accessible to everyone (whether welcome or not).

In the context of Brookner’s fiction, there is both Brookner the-writer-as-artist, and the Brookner protagonist as cultural observer. From her role as an historian of the artist, Brookner is well aware of the significance of the emotions for both the artistic producer and consumer. ‘It should be remembered that the Romantic painter has designs on the spectator,’ she writes. ‘He is out to remove the spectator from his normal or appropriate perceptual field, and in doing so to infect him with his own personal doubts.’ The discomfort that arises from reading Brookner’s fiction comes precisely from her skilful wielding of pathos. The critical backlash against Brookner and her stereotyping as a boring, lonely woman stems from her ability to restage cultural anxieties in her fiction.

Across Brookner’s fiction, the Brookner protagonist enacts a range of emotional responses which reflect how we engage with the world, and also, in our response to the Brooknerine, how we respond to other people’s responses. Sometimes desire is  blinding and results in the misreading of a situation. At other times, action is subsumed to self-examination, with varying repercussions. On occasion, emotion may be sublimated to an intellectual position, without acknowledgment. Or else a response is confected because authenticity is unwelcome. Through the Brooknerine’s observations, we see that emotional responses are deemed acceptable in some people and not in others. There is a certain status behind public emoting, which adds another dimension to the solitary Brookner protagonist, who often experiences emotions in isolation. The gamut of emotional experiences tested and analysed by the Brooknerine is what informs her uncanny resemblance to the nineteenth-century French male artist.

When asked to comment on the Brookner heroine, described by interviewer Nigel Ford as ‘a woman of uncertain age, probably genteel, who strives for much more than she’s got,’ Brookner replied:  

When reading Brookner, therefore, expect to see a reflection of yourself; one that you may not necessarily like and that may normally be kept hidden.

Brookner’s ability to elicit an emotional response is what makes the criticism of her so interesting and is what underwrites her ability to reflect the zeitgeist. The spray of abuse directed at Brookner, which shaped her public stereotype and initial reading, might more productively be geared towards a practice of self-examination. A reader might inquire, for instance, exactly why a single woman is old-fashioned and boring? What expectations about time and sex inform such a prejudice?I think that’s a little bit reductive.

I think that these women do exist. But they exist as a reflection of, I think, other people’s difficulties, as well as their own. They seem to be blank screens. I’m interested in where they stand outside the pressures that other people put on them.  

The significance of gender roles in our society is such that when we criticise behaviour it often seems to be a critique of how someone is not fulfilling the cultural enforcement to enact gender in a certain way. A quarter of Brookner’s novels feature main protagonists who are men: Latecomers (1988), Lewis Percy (1999), A Private View (1994), Altered States (1996), The Next Big Thing / Making Things Better (2002) and Strangers (2009). Generally speaking, the Brookner novel travels along fairly consistently regardless of who’s at the helm. For the most part this is because of Brookner’s privileging of the emotional response. (Note: for astrology buffs Brookner is cancer sun, cancer moon [like Harrison Ford]. Cancer is a water sign ruled by the moon and the emotions.)

Brookner’s own comments (not about astrology) reflect the degree to which she weighs the significance of gender against that of the emotional response in a way which effectively deconstructs the ideology of sexual difference. ‘I don’t think women are victims,’ she said in 1998. ‘Men have feelings too and suffer just as much as a result.’ And in 1989: ‘I think men aren’t given enough credit for their hurt feelings. I think feminism has made heroines out of some very unworthy women – and I think men deserve a hand now and again. They have the same emotions, they really do. Bedrock emotions: hope, fear, loneliness, that sort of thing.’ For Brookner, men and women are both susceptible to human flaws and frailties, the denial of which supports the cultural enforcement to conform to gender roles. Men are vulnerable – or manipulative and irrational. And by the same token women exhibit so-called masculine qualities: competitiveness – and strength ‘Women are not automatically good to women. There’s a great pecking order there which is sort of undisclosed. And they don’t want to be left behind in the race.’ She maintained, somewhat controversially, that ‘the women in the book are strong’, when discussing A Start in Life.

Brookner’s thoughts are also interesting to consider in light of her own stereotyping as a ‘women’s writer,’ a label which has arguably undermined her status in the literary field. While Brookner has expressed ‘delight’ at being described as a ‘women’s novelist,’ she nominates the comment: ‘you write French books, don’t you?’ as her all-time favourite critique. Just as Brookner herself has been called a Parisienne, the Brookner novel might then be thought of as a French book. This genre- and canon-shifting is fascinating insofar as the ‘poisonous’ French book (so described about Huysmans’ A Rebours in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray) functions as a euphemism for the scandalous sexual tale.

[The following is part of Peta Mayer’s 10 Things to Expect From a Brookner Novel.]

In Brookner’s 1984 Booker Prize winning novel, Hotel du Lac, the main protagonist, Edith Hope, a mildly successful romance novelist, ventures out to lunch following her involvement in a sexual scandal. She meets with her literary agent, Harold Webb, who tentatively suggests that the demure conquests of Edith’s novels are in danger of being superseded by the ‘sex sells’ mentality of the contemporary marketplace: ‘I have to tell you that the romantic market is beginning to change,’ he says. ‘It’s sex for the young woman executive now, the Cosmopolitan reader, the girl with the executive briefcase.’ Edith counters Harold’s argument with what is probably Brookner’s most-frequently quoted line. ‘Aesop was writing for the tortoise market,’ she retorts, defending her mousey heroines by arguing that losers only win in fiction because only losers have the time to read and therefore subject matter is manipulated to flatter their egos. Edith’s statement is not only a comment on her readers, however, it also attributes to the publishing industry an enormous influence on the novel-writing process. What should sex, or desire, look like in the contemporary novel?

You’d be hard-pressed to argue that Brookner’s novels are full of sex, yet in a way that’s what I do throughout my 80,000 word PhD thesis. When it was put to Brookner that her novels should contain ‘more explicit sex,’ she stated, ‘These matters are private and should remain so. In fiction as in life. That’s part of my old code, which I can’t break.’ But the ‘infinite longing… a longing for what is missing and an attempt to supply it’ – which for Brookner informs the emotional response and creative process of the Romantic artist  –  also speaks of a form of desire. Brookner resists the cultural enforcement towards emphatic articulation, so that everyone knows who desires who and what these desires and identities look like. Yet at the same time, her novels are suffused with a sense of longing, making the sexual energy of the Brookner text ambiguous and multivalent. Readers bring to the novels their own interpretation of what they know and see and feel (or want to). And this changes historically, especially when, as in Brookner’s case, the text is left fairly open. When Brookner began writing fiction in the 1980s, there was outrage because if single women spoke of unsatisfied desire they were either too passive or not exploiting their legendary freedoms. This was the notorious ‘old-fashioned’ time-lag of the Brooknerine and reflected the way in which ‘old-fashioned’ functioned as a euphemism for ‘not heterosexual’. Nowadays, it’s possible to read Brookner a little more queer. The mainstreaming of the queer canon, combined with Brookner’s reluctance to define desire exclusively through identity politics and the homosocial environment of the Brookner text all suggest that eros in Brookner’s novels is as complex as it is in life. There’s good news though: ‘I don’t think sexuality ever goes away,’ she says.

[The following is part of Peta Mayer’s 10 Things to Expect From a Brookner Novel.]

Just as Brookner protagonists are flâneurs, they are also readers. (I once read a review which lamented that if only Brooknerines could read Brookner they might not feel so alone). Similar to how Brookner’s references to nineteenth-century art open up the intertextual field of the novel, her references to nineteenth-century literature add another dimension of knowledge to the text. While Brookner herself is a voracious reader of contemporary fiction, Brooknerines nevertheless incline towards the nineteenth-century French writers such as Balzac, Constant, Stendhal, Proust, du Stael and their token compadre, Maestro Henry James (to whom I dedicate an entire point). Other writers on the Brooknerine’s bedside table include Colette, Charlotte Bronte, George Gissing, Rimbaud, Tennyson and Heine. When contemporary writing is mentioned in the Brookner text, it is usually popular fiction which is portrayed in a negative light, such as romance novels in Hotel du Lac and Falling Slowly. Note: Brookner began a reviewing career with the fine art journal, the Burlington Magazine, in the early 1960s and, at age eighty-three, occasionally reviews for The Spectator.

Reading is central to the Brookner novel but it is also a huge problem. Witness the first line of Brookner’s first novel A Start in Life: ‘Ruth Weiss, at forty, knew her life had been ruined by literature.’ Insofar as reading, or misreading, is held accountable for perpetuating cultural myths, creating false hope and propagating a lack of reality in everyday lives it is deemed a central cause of misery in the lives of Brookner’s heroines. As Brookner told John Haffenden in 1984, ‘the lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.’ Of course there is the irony that reading about books being misleading, may in fact be misleading. The solution? Re-reading! ‘Rereading is more important than reading for the first time?’ Brookner was asked in 1990. ‘I think it is, I think it is,’ she replied. In which case, if you’re thinking of choosing one of Brookner’s twenty-four novels to read for the first time, by now you should be feeling increasingly anxious about the fact that there’s actually forty-eight novels to read. Fear not. Part 2 of this series is entitled ’10 Things To Expect From Re-reading A Brookner Novel.’

[The following is part of Peta Mayer’s 10 Things to Expect From a Brookner Novel.]

Brookner’s passion for nineteenth-century art and literature is one reason for her representation as old-fashioned. The interesting thing here is that it was in the nineteenth century that our present day understanding of both the contemporary and the old-fashioned were articulated. Nineteenth century Romanticism broke away from previous art movements (Classicism etc) with the aim to represent the present moment, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. In The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire’s prophetic staging of urban personae, he characterises a contemporary representational practice as that which is combined of ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.’ Art, then, is meant to show something of the Now and something of the Then, something contemporary and something old-fashioned.

Is Brookner, then, old-fashioned because she conforms to a nineteenth-century ideal of art or is she old-fashioned because she’s classical and she doesn’t conform to a nineteenth-century ideal? Indeed is she ‘contemporary’ – for the very same reasons? Is the ‘zeitgeist’ an historical or universal concept? Perhaps Brookner’s novels provide some insight. What you can expect from her fiction is a juxtaposition of the old and new. With few exceptions, Brookner’s novels are set in contemporary Britain, but it is through the rendering of minor characters, of youth, of urban scenes and pop culture iconography that a contemporary time/space is most effectively represented.

In A Private View (1994), there is Katy Gibb, an aspiring practitioner of Shiatsu, Vibrasound, Tantric Massage, Reflexology, Chakra, Crystal Therapy, Essential Oils, Flower Remedies, Colour Counselling: ‘you name it.’ There’s Doris, The Big Issue seller in Undue Influence. There is twenty-two year old laconic Steve Best who emerges, through a haze of rollerbladers, to stay with Dorothea May in Visitors and ‘check out the music scene.’ In Falling Slowly, there is Anne Marie Kinsella, the sixteen year old dieting daughter of Miriam and Beatrice’s cleaner, whose preoccupation with school means she doesn’t get a lot of time for reading and prefers to catch Pride and Prejudice on the telly. The contemporary personae of Brookner’s fiction are testimony to her ongoing engagement with the zeitgeist. Or are they more so caricatures of a culture of degeneration?