When I was reading for a Master's Degree at Mills College many years ago, one of my Literature Courses was in Anita Brookner. I was an independent scholar after the first year, since I had moved from the Bay Area to Malibu, and therefore continued my studies with several professors, meeting once a month for tutorials with all of them over about a three day period at the College and studying independently the rest of the time. I read all of Anita Brookner's work to that date and have subsequently read all of them to this date, including her nonfiction on art for which I have great admiration. When I had finished my course and was about to get my Master's Degree, one of my literature professors, then the Dean of Letters, asked me to write a précis for each of Brookner's novels and to select a few that I thought might be worth her teaching in the future. These are some of them. I have subsequently written one for each of her twenty four novels just for amusement. Three are not quite finished as I usually read the books three times before making any substantive comment on them. There are nine here out of twenty one finished précis - they all contain spoilers.

Anita Brookner Précis

A Start in Life

A life has been ruined by literature. But this is not a surprise. Ruth Weiss, at forty, knew that she knew this at twenty. She only remembers now that she ensured it would happen. Is she unhappy? How can she be? She does not know enough to be other than puzzled. It was a self-desired and self-fulfilling prophecy - to be able to utter such a grand sentiment, containing as it does "literature" and "ruin" in such proximity. It is the closest she will get to grandeur - emulating Eugenie Grandet, all the while believing in fairy tales.

"Cinderella will go to the ball" she had whispered as a child, not yet knowing that it was not Cinderella's circumstance, nor character, nor beauty which rewarded her with a prince, but rather that one, unconsciously italicized word in the whisper: "will."  Ruth lacks it.  She moves not by volition, but by that which propels her. What that is, is daughterhood. She will never recover.

Providence

Another life has been ruined by literature. But this was not supposed to happen. Kitty Maule is in love - and words have been her guide. Why then, against all that they have promised, is virtue not rewarded, patience its own end? Why does the tortoise not win the race?

The romantic tradition which she so assiduously teaches at a London University, and with which she is unknowingly at some variance, propels her towards a grand constancy. But she is a constant in a one-sided equation, a numerator of pitiable alienation. The other numerator is fellow professor Maurice, a shining, implausible bundle of virtues himself. There is no common denominator. The sum, therefore, is one.

Look at Me

Tortoises will not necessarily lose a race against other tortoises. But they will insist on running with hares. Frances Hinton, a self-proclaimed tortoise, works in a library of madness, and is seen to know better. When the sought-after doctor, Nick, appears in the library with his wife Alix for the first time, she realizes that the Nicks of the world are "quite simply unattainable... by the likes of anyone who was not Alix or her equivalent." Frances is not equivalent. If she were, she would not have to cry "look at me - look at me."

In reality, the title is ironic. Frances does not want to be looked at - displayed. She wants to be loved - obscurely. And so, she will write. Someday, someone -  a reader - will love her, and elevate her from the rabbit fields, into the longevity and protective shell of literature.

Hotel du Lac

In Edith Hope's fictional world, the tortoises always win over hares. She writes romance novels under a pseudonym, quite possibly because she cannot quite believe her own tenet, and therefore, herself. Like her sister characters before her, Edith's moral dilemmas do not include infidelity when she is the infidel. The mistress of David, an auction gallery owner, Edith cares nothing for his wife, and yet is outraged when her potential husband is found to be sexually involved with another woman.

The irony here is that the honesty of the latter in making no claim to fidelity goes unappreciated, while the deceit and dishonor she must practice on a regular basis with another woman's husband seems to bear little examination. One can only conclude that this is an attempt at haredom - this callous disregard for anyone's feelings other than one's own, but it falls short.

Edith fails to recognize that the hares' claim to the spotlight lies not in the immorality of their acts but in the style, charm and effortlessness with which they enact them. They unconsciously believe in their pursuits. Edith does not. She will flail, brittle and uncertain, against a world of hares, expending a grotesque amount of fruitless internal energy in the hope of "having it all" someday - unlike them, who simply make the most of some of it.

Family and Friends

Raising children for a world that will no longer exist when they are raised is a common Brookner theme. Here, however, we see the raising more clearly. It is again the dichotomy between the selfish, charming children and the dutiful daughters and sons. Sofka, their mother, understands which are which, as far as she is able.  In fact the murderous rage burning in the breasts of the docile, and the reversion of the selfish to childhood values as life progresses, obscure the bounds of im/propriety.

As Sofka ages, her children begin to personify her own vices and virtues in apparent random distribution. A family photograph, in the opening page of this novel, taken at a wedding in a millisecond when they were all very young, is a portrait of their fluctuous paths through each other. It remains accurate.

A Misalliance

The unsuitable alliance here is not Blanche Vernon's with her recently "ex" husband Bertie, nor even that of Bertie with his new "love" the childish, ridiculous Mousie, but rather Blanche with life itself. Curiously, Blanche, intelligent, imaginative, witty and capable, is attracted to the kind of life she seems incapable of producing - or sustaining. These include, (but are not limited to) the sensuous, languid young mother, Sally, with her silent bud-like child, Elinor (in whose lives Blanche becomes inextricably involved); the voluptuous paintings of nymphs, holding pomegranates and (according to Blanche who views them with an understandably skewed eye) secret knowledge, in the National Gallery (which she substitutes for home) - and of course the vigorous, restless Bertie, not long departed from their once shared home - and still, a frequent visitor.

Blanche, like all Brookner heroines, has contorted, expunged, self-sacrificed, curtailed, reshaped, and diminished herself in order to please the object of her affections: the prize, the husband. This, however, did not please him. It is again the race of the two species, with the selfish, demanding, childish, brainless and rude winning the prize. In A Misalliance however, after a rare passage of magnificent self-discovery and self-acceptance, the tortoise wins. Or loses.

Bertie comes back.

A Friend From England

A substitution easily becomes an obsession. Perhaps the unacknowledged realization, somewhere inside, that it is not real, not one's own, propels the urge to excess. Certainly Rachel Kennedy, without family or friends of her own, becomes family-friend retainer to the Livingstones - remembering their little preferences in cakes and weather, supplying an audience to their myopic family tales, giving succor, sustenance, advice, protection to their daughter when it is perceived to be needed, though, in fact, it is not.  Rachel is in danger of becoming scenery.

Meanwhile, life as the Livingstones choose to live it, goes on despite any input from Rachel. She makes no impact, no difference. They like her, the family friend. And she loves, cares for, worries over, them - until one day in Venice, when it becomes clear that Rachel is first with no one, has no face across from her at her own table, no body in her bed - no one, in fact to perform those services for -  and engender those feelings in - her. Not even herself.

Latecomers

There is a fibrous constancy in some, rare, friendships which eludes subsequent experience. This is the case with Hartmann and Fibich, two former Jewish refugees from Germany. Now middle-aged and reasonably prosperous, the unity of their relationship remains intact. Closely woven together by unspoken fears, Fibich relies heavily on Hartmann for safety, while Harmann needs Fibich for self-identity. They are such complements that it is difficult to tell where one personality begins and the other ends. There is no suggestion of an unhealthy reliance - they marry, have children, live English lives. Yet, in a curious literary conundrum reminiscent of science fiction, they seem to have impregnated their wives with each other's children, Hartmann's daughter resembling Christine (Mrs. Fibich), and Fibich's son a direct psychological descendent of Yvette (Mrs. Hartmann).

In fact, the real lesson is how to draw the right things from a shared past in order to live in an unfamiliar present. When Fibich returns to Germany for a short visit, after fifty years, he brings back to Hartmann an even truer companion - his own transformed fear and the knowledge that "battles can be fought and won in the mind."

Lewis Percy

There was a Lewis Percy. He saw it himself, one morning in the mirror, while shaving. That was before the house crumbled and there was no mirror left - only Tissy, his china doll wife, sitting with ankles crossed, hands folded, and skirts spread out decorously over the Victorian sofa, presiding like a household deity, over nothing.

And like the dear little tendrils of fragile vine creeping over the charming cottage, slowly destroying its mortar, Tissy's silent prettiness hollowed out the shell of Lewis Percy. They never had a disagreement.  Or an agreement. He had always wanted to be a character in a book - and fancied himself a man, there to protect her. When, instead, he found that she had been protecting herself, (largely against him) he changed his definition of manhood, flew off to America and divorced her.

She didn't notice.