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

Is it common for writers to be questioned about their suitability for therapy? For some reason, Brookner seems to constantly field this enquiry. When asked whether her novels were ‘a sort of self-therapy’, Brookner replied, ‘Well, if it were therapy I wish it had worked.’ She has also said that psychoanalysis wasn’t within her scope; ‘One doesn’t know how intelligent the interrogator would be.’ And when asked about the status of ‘lifestyle’ psychology, she maintains, ‘Very lucrative professions. Fallacious.’ While the novelist deftly dispatches with the coarser attempts to contextualise her life and work through reductive psychological models, she does, however, engage Freudian narratives in her fiction, her criticism and in personal commentary.

For a start, the unconscious is of enormous importance to Brookner in the writing process (complementing the significance of the emotional response). She calls her books ‘accidents of the unconscious.’ ‘I certainly haven’t modelled them on anybody or anything,’ she said. Especially reinforced in terms of its role in artistic production, the unconscious accrues an historical mystique not unlike that of Freud himself. Representing an increasing turn to Freud in her later fiction, Brookner’s most recent novel, Strangers (2009), opens with a late quote from Freud in London, 1938: ‘For all its glory England is a land for rich and healthy people. Also they should not be too old.’ Here Brookner chooses a sentiment which uncharacteristically takes Freud, the dying refugee, challenging national stereotypes rather than reinforcing sexual ones.   

Secondly, as in Freud, the family has a fundamental and ongoing impact on character and identity in Brookner’s novels. This is quite crucial in Brookner insofar as the childless and unmarried are frequently seen in mainstream culture to exist outside a familial environment. ‘For a writer who is unmarried and has no children and whose heroines have no children, Anita Brookner pays unusual attention to children,’ said one mystified critic. Yet children are not the sole perquisite of heterosexual families and indeed the figure of the child is an important literary device regardless of his/her current social and historical function. Children, for instance, can symbolise creativity, rebellion or freedom. Brookner’s novels reassert these social and literary rights in a way which complements the significance of familial actors in Freud. A Family Romance (1993) (Dolly in the US), Brookner’s thirteenth novel, takes its title from Freud’s expression for the child’s fantasy that his/her birth parents are not his/her actual but adoptive parents. In the novel, Jane Manning, a feminist academic and children’s book author, acknowledges her parents stable and loving relationship but evinces a fascination with her more charismatic and unpredictable aunt, Dolly. These swerves of affect in family lines are of interest to Brookner and Freud alike. However, because they don’t follow a conventional developmental narrative, they frequently fail to register as important narratives per se. 

In Freud, the child’s early years are a time of sexual discovery, a period when anything can happen. Desire is ‘polymorphously perverse’ and precognisant of gendered and sexual identities. Those narratives which don’t follow conventional developmental form create characters who are not, by definition, ‘straight.’ ‘I think all his conclusions are correct, frankly. One does look to one’s parents; one does look to infantile sexuality,’ Brookner said of Freud in 2006. Expect, then, to find Brookner’s characters a little bent

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

How do you account for the passion that someone you love has for someone else? This is the task I confront when I think about how to contextualise the relationship between Brookner and Henry James. I look to her while she looks to him. Indeed the whole literary world looks to Henry James, but what does he look like to Brookner? For years Brookner was charged with writing a poorer man’s Henry James, meaning that you got some of the pain and deliberation without some of the sensitivity and charm. But if we take Harold Bloom’s theory of influence to heart, it also means we read James now in the light of Brookner. In which case she seems more sensitive to audience than he, more generous – less egotistically-wrought – and therefore lighter, trickier, more divested and perhaps more experimental. (Sorry, Henry)

Whatever the case, references to James pervade the Brookner oeuvre. She coupled James with Dickens when she said, ‘I’m quite content to claim these two great men as my mentors’ (although in the Brown interview she is less willing to establish a direct line of influence). Brookner wrote the preface to the Modern Library Classics 2001 edition of The Portrait of a Lady, although it’s probably one of her least admirable pieces insofar as her signature voice is mostly absent. Elsewhere she’s described him as a writer ‘whose every novel and story hovers over some kind of immanence, as if life were reserving surprises which are sensed though rarely directly addressed,’ and this tussle with the immanent is also true of Brookner’s fiction. Despite James’s own struggle with literary celebrity, she represents his legacy as ‘a life for which the terms success and failure are wholly inadequate.’ Like Brookner, James was a walker, ‘almost as prodigious as Dickens he would, on Sundays, walk from Kensington to Hampstead to visit Du Maurier, walk with him round Hampstead Heath, repair to the Du Mauriers for a meal, and then walk back to Kensington.’ Like James, Brookner ‘could dine out every night if she wanted to,’ her friend Carmen Calill once explained (Brookner dedicated A Friend from England to Calill). And, also like James, Brookner’s sexuality has been the subject of speculation. ‘That he remained celibate is an obvious difficulty for the modern reader, though this may have been no more than personal choice, or, alternatively, a consequence of the madness of art,’ she wrote. James’s celibacy is famously up for debate, as indeed are the figurative desires of the Brooknerine.

Brooknerines are committed readers of Henry James. In Falling Slowly, James provides a refuge for Miriam Sharpe in a time of tragedy.James constitutes a diversion for Miriam, not only to the extent that his fiction offers a kind of panacea, but also because of the personal (sexual) mythology that surrounds him. Brookner gives A Closed Eye its title and epigraph from James’s Madame de Mauves, ‘She strikes me as a person who is begging off from full knowledge, – who has struck a truce with painful truth, and is trying awhile the experiment of living with closed eyes.’ In this novel, James is recruited as the expert of a type of necessary self-deception. But he’s not always or primarily a signifier of desperation for Brookner. In A Misalliance, Blanche Vernon wields James as a symbol of her controversial behaviour: ‘I might make an injudicious remark or start raving on about Henry James,’ she threatens her ex-husband Bertie. Brooknerines, then, can mobilise their Jamesian ravings to beneficent ends.

Already she had got through What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age, and was about to start on The Tragic Muse. She marvelled that Henry James knew so much about women and children, yet had remained a bachelor, and by all accounts a man of the greatest integrity. She liked that about him, that and his reputation for modesty. He had deferred to worldly friends, as if he were not more worldly than any of them. There was nothing cheap about Henry James.

[This review of Hotel du Lac originally appeared on Boston Bibliophile in January 2011.]

Hotel du Lac is a quiet novel that nonetheless has a lot to say. Winner of the 1984 Booker Prize, it’s the story of Edith Hope, a writer on a self-imposed exile at an out-of-season Swiss hotel, which she shares with a small group of (mostly) women. Mrs. Iris Pusey is a narcissistic grande dame on perpetual holiday with her spinster daughter Jennifer; their primary occupation is consumption- shopping and eating. Monica is a tall, striking woman accompanied by a small dog but otherwise alone, a single middle-aged woman looking for what the Puseys already have, a wealthy man to support her. An older woman also resides at the hotel, staying on until the end of the season, at which time her family will send her elsewhere to be looked after. And then there is Edith, alone for entirely different reasons, who forms slight attachments to each but remains definitively on her own.

What we do know about Edith is that she’s desperately in love with David, a married man and art dealer, to whom she writes detailed letters about the people and goings on at the hotel. But David is not the primary scandal she’s escaping, and he won’t be her redemption, either. That story unfolds slowly as Edith gets to know a Mr. Neville, a single and well-off man also in residence at this placid hotel that nonetheless buzzes with the quiet desperation of its inhabitants.

At the core of this slim novel is character- Brookner’s and Edith’s sharp character studies of the ladies, especially the Puseys, and Edith’s own arc as she makes difficult choices about the next stage of her life. For a long stretch her future is open-ended and uncertain as she steps through each day walking the town, writing and navigating the genteel minefield of the other ladies’ own emotional landscapes. The setting reflects Edith’s state of mind, perpetually gray and blank. Color comes from the ladies’ clothing and conversation. She’s recovering from a major trauma, and more than that, has to decide what to do next; uncertainty is the dominant tone. Towards the end decisions agendas are revealed that change that landscape and lead to Edith’s final choice, and it feels so right and well-drawn that it’s hard to imagine it turning out any other way.

Hotel du Lac is a fine literary read that readers of thoughtful womens’ fiction will savor and enjoy. Brookner mixes pathos and humor- her portrait of Mrs. Pusey in particular has moments of real hilarity- in a novel that resembles Jane Austen written in a contemporary style, but with an emphasis on the pathos. She uses the very Austenian theme of women’s economic vulnerability but instead of marriage solving life’s problems, she asks if the material rewards of dependence engender a kind of complacency or even rot. But the novel is smarter than to be so simple-minded in its message; Brookner also sets up contrasts that ask if being alone is the worth the price it demands as well. Overall thoughtful, thought-provoking and lovely, Hotel du Lac is a beautifully crafted narrative that will reward the careful reader.

[The following review of Incidents in the Rue Laugier was written by Darlene at Roses Over a Cottage Door.]

Maud was quite aware of her mother’s needs and desires. She knew that her marriage would put an end to an overpreparedness which they both found intolerable. How often had she winced to feel her mother’s hand in the small of her back, propelling her forward to greet some man, any man, even the ancient family doctor, even Xavier…, and to hear her mother’s voice voice exaggerating her slender accomplishments.

How could I ever have doubted Thomas’ affection for Anita Brookner? Her writing is beautiful, her characters keenly observed and she masterfully tells a story in a way that is both succinct and sweeping.

Appearance is everything to Maud’s mother, Nadine, which means the small pension left by her deceased husband must be eked out very carefully. Meat is bought every day but only small cutlets, trips to the dressmaker are spaced out and services to the concierge of the building are kept up twice a week to uphold her status in the building. If she is careful, the money will last until Maud marries. While marriage to a rich man would suit Nadine’s pride, the truth is that any marriage will relieve her of her commitments as a mother.

Unspoken shame accompanies Nadine and Maud when the only annual trip they can afford is to accept a begrudgingly made invitation by Maud’s aunt. During this year’s visit the house is buzzing with her cousin Xavier’s friends while Maud stands apart with her careful grooming and starched blouses. The other young guests with their pedigree backgrounds laugh, drink and sneak away in couples to the summer house. One of them, David Tyler, is perfect in every way with his ability to make any outfit look better for his wearing it, his handsome face and charming ways that heighten the colour of even mature women. His reputation for bedding young ladies and leaving them heartbroken in the span of an afternoon does nothing to lessen his appeal. His friend, Edward Harrison is well on his way to building a secure future and has a conscience. Guess which one Maud falls for?

Left in a troubled state, Maud is rescued by the offer of marriage from Edward. He is from an English family and their differences result in a riveting exploration of cultures clashing and the expectations of marriage. Brookner writes stunningly from both sides of the marital bed and I sympathized equally with both partners. With Maud for having no option other than to marry someone she didn’t love and knowing her mother was fine with that. And with Edward, conflicted over desperately wanting his wife to belong to him heart and soul while feeling he is sacrificing his freedom to take on another man’s responsibility. Though I must say that I quite enjoyed the way Brookner dealt with Tyler.

Incidents in the Rue Laugier completely changed my mind about Brookner making it a good choice as a first book if you’re considering this author. Thanks to Thomas at [Hogglestock] for being passionate about this author and surreptitiously reminding to give her another try.