Anita Brookner (1928–2016)

This was Brookner's first novel. This is my second Brookner novel. How it took me this long to get to her is a question for the ages. Originally, I was going to read her books on my Kindle because the library has almost all of them on Overdrive but it's become apparent to me that I must own them all. I want to see them lined up on my shelf like I have my Barbara Pym books lined up. Not that they're all that similar. Well, maybe in a quirky, understated, Pymian sort of way. I find myself show more sitting with a satisfied sigh when I get to the end of each of their novels as I replay it through my mind.

This one is the story of 40 year old Ruth Weiss, a Balzac scholar who is thinking back on her life. The title would've been better if it had been A Restart in Life because that's what she had to do. After a fairly miserable childhood with parents who were nuts to say the least--- father a rare book store owner, mother a has been stage actress---Ruth goes to Paris to pursue who doctorate. She leaves her mother who rarely gets out of bed even though there is not one thing wrong with her, and her father who is dallying with another woman, and Mrs. Cutler, the housekeeper who keeps the household from falling into complete and total disarray. Just as she gets settled her own place and interests and possible lover she is forced to return home.

Brookner, like Pym, is a master of the understated, the ironic, the comic and unlike Pym, the tragic. But her wordplay is absolutely delicious:

"Then Richard would wing home to his parish and stay up for two whole nights answering the telephone to teenage dropouts, battered wives, recidivists, and alcoholics. There seemed to be no end to the amount of bad news he could absorb." (page 38)

"He's liable for the Tribunal if he don't" said Miss Howe inaccurately; she sometimes regretted that she had so little to complain about."(Page 40)

The book is littered (in a good way) with gems like these. It matters little to me if not much happens. That's not the point here. It's the incredible characters and the language. The wonderful language, the irony, the humor, the insight. Just delightful.

This book won't be for everyone but for me it was sublime and I'll be moving on to another Brookner next month. I'm reading her books in order of publication and she wrote twice as many as Pym so it'll take me twice as long as it did 2013 when I read the Pym books. show less

Whenever I read a certain kind of woman's novel where the protagonist is either middle-aged, tired and/or disgraced, I tend to worry about, what I call, "The Awakening" effect where a woman may find, when there are no other options available to her, that there's only one way out of a bad situation.
Hotel Du Lac, written nearly 100 years after Chopin's "The Awakening" and set in the 1980's proves to be a document as to how far women have come.
Romance writer, Edith Hope, has been advised by show more her friends to get out of town, regroup and think about the dreadful thing she's done. Exile at Hotel Du Lac at first repulses Edith and also perhaps the reader. Edith describes everything in her room the color of cooked veal, a misty shroud encompasses the lake and surrounding mountains. Edith and the reader are trapped! Although the story unfolds at a snails pace and some may even toss it aside one should look at Edith's story more as a character study of those also staying at the hotel. The other women at Du Lac are also in some type of exile and in them Edith reflects on who she is and who she might become if she chooses to remain on the path she's been traveling. She may find it necessary to fall into line with old school thought or she may discover she has options.
Hotel Du Lac in September and Edith, both dignified, solid and out of season are empowering and well worth a quick read. show less

This novel is an exquisite hymn to loneliness. Every character in it, however inconsequential, is lonely in their own way. It is also quite analytical, describing in some detail, the main characters' inner thoughts, torments and motivations etc - even when they are not conscious of them themselves.

The first two chapters cover the end of the story, then it tells the story chronologically until it reaches the end again. Consequently, Very early on, you learn that a significant character will show more die. Obviously this affects the way you read the rest of the book and whilst I can't decide whether I'd have preferred it if I had not known, it is interesting wondering how different it could have been.

Whilst it is not a cheerful book, neither is it as depressing as it may sound! show less

No one does loneliness like Brookner.

Providence feels more controlled than the other books of hers I've read, in the sense that it reads almost like an extremely well-choreographed play, each scene very tight and taut, each emotional shift in protagonist Kitty Maule's mind orchestrated with a very deft hand—most times omniscient, and other times delving directly into her thoughts.

Unlike some of the other lonely and socially-estranged protagonists that populate Brookner's novels, Kitty is show more more independent, self-willed, and self-governed: while her upbringing leaves her feeling alienated and unsure as to which culture or nation she belongs (her mother's side of the family is French; her father, whom she never knew, British), she seems to carve out a niche for herself in the academic world, researching the Romantic tradition.

Brookner intersperses scenes from Kitty's seminar on Benjamin Constant's Romantic novel Adolphe with Kitty's own struggles to gain recognition as an academic, as an individual, and also to gain the admiration and love she desires from another scholar, Maurice Bishop. Kitty has several female role models, none of whom seem to fit her own particular sense of being in the world: her neighbor, Caroline, who is fashion-conscious, divorced, and drags Kitty to a psychic; her colleague, Pauline, who is also lassoed in by family, caring for her elderly, blind mother, yet able to balance an academic career of her own; and her aging grandmother, who clings to Parisian ways and modes of fashion despite living in London, and who wishes to see Kitty married before she dies.

The love interest aspect of Providence is more interesting than ones I've encountered in previous Brookner's: Maurice is more accessible than the typical Brookner protagonist's object of obsession, and it is through the lens of aesthetics and academics that Kitty and Maurice can relate to one another on almost equal footing—apart, that is, from Maurice's faith and Kitty's lack of faith, and, too, apart from a past love affair that Maurice clings to stubbornly like an albatross and against which Kitty feels powerless to assert herself.

Despite its strengths in the very controlled way it's plotted, unlike the meandering Falling Slowly, Providence fails slightly with its abrupt ending: admittedly, it works, but it doesn't satisfy or bring the various threads with which Brookner is working to a pleasing denouement. There is less pathos here than in her other books, and, perhaps, this is why the ending left at least this reader feeling as if something was missing, or as if the ending was rushed without much thought... something made all the more glaring given the extreme composure of the novel as a whole. Indeed, more seems to happen in the discussions of Adolphe's considerations of love, individuality, and the Romantic hero's predicament than it does at the end of Providence when it comes to Kitty: the intertextual foregrounding doesn't altogether work, then. show less