It’s easy to mock Anita Brookner’s novels, populated as they are by self-effacing spinsters, unreturned library books and solitary omelettes. The day after I heard the news of her death, a friend and I sniggered online at the coincidentally Brookner-esque fact that I was about to head to John Lewis, where I hoped to return two unwanted vests. “I expect to flinch inwardly at the shop assistant’s voice, experiencing his helpfulness only as a commentary on my dusty, liminal life,” I wrote in an email. “But I will be wearing my ‘good’ coat, and I hope this will see me through.”
All I can tell you is that, in my case, such teasing is born of deep admiration. Brookner would, I’m guessing, have been slightly amazed at the teenage me who adored beyond words her first three novels (A Start in Life, Look at Me and Providence), slim stories that I devoured in quick succession. Soon after, she won the Booker prize for Hotel du Lac in 1984 (I read that too, and thought it vastly inferior, after which I gave her up for a little while). Then again, she might have taken it in her (careful, reserved) stride. The teenage girl is full of yearning, but she also feels misunderstood, invisible, at an awkward angle to the world: in this, little separates her from such characters as Ruth Weiss, Kitty Maule and Frances Hinton.
The wonderfully named Maule is the heroine of Providence, which I pulled from the shelf last week, and re-read in 24 hours. Maule is a university academic who is in love with her colleague, the dashing but unreliable Maurice. She longs to reel him in, but her technique is too diffident, and his heart too ruthlessly pragmatic. Soon, her curdled hope will come to be symbolised rather horribly by a soup tureen, a workaday, bourgeois object only a writer as good as Brookner could imbue with such agonising pathos. Elegant and wry (people forget how witty Brookner can be), it was every bit as good as I remembered, and possibly a little better. Or perhaps it’s only that in this, the age of the selfie, her characters’ dignity and stoicism feel like a life raft into which this reader, at least, is happy to leap.
