Review: A Start in Life

[

[This review of A Start in Life (The Debut) is from The Mookse and the Gripes.]

About ten years ago I read Anita Brookner’s Booker Prize-winning novel Hotel du Lac. I remember very little about it now, though I think I was rather positive. However, I didn’t feel any compulsion to read more of her work. Over the last year or so, though, I’ve seen more and more of my trusted book-reading friends proclaiming that she is among their favorites, that they cannot get enough, that if you’ve only read Hotel du Lac you really don’t know how great she is. Okay, I finally said, I’ll give her a go (it helped that Penguin UK had just released a large batch of her books in attractive new editions). I started at the beginning, her 1981 novel A Start in Life, and it is among the best debuts I have ever read. It is among the best books I’ve read. I loved it unconditionally. I have nothing bad to say about it whatsoever. I do plan on highlighting some of its strengths and delights in this post, but if you’re looking for anything other than praise for Brookner’s debut you will come up empty here.

Let’s start with the opening line:

Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

Is there any way for readers like us to resist such an opener? It’s bold and wonderful. I’m glad to say that the book just keeps getting better from there.

Our protagonist is Ruth Weiss. The story begins when she is forty and trying to reconcile all of the unanticipated — even unwanted — occurrences that led her to where she is in life. As a child, the “moral universe” was presented in the books she loved: “For virtue would surely triumph, patience would surely be rewarded.” As a child, she couldn’t imagine it being any different, and she feels that she was blinded to some greater truth:

So eager was she to join this upward movement towards the light that she hardly noticed that her home resembled the ones she was reading about: a superficial veil of amusement over a deep well of disappointment.

Most of the novel concerns her upbringing in London and her attempt to become independent in Paris. Holding her back are her fully realized parents, George and Helen. We learn about what they wanted in life, as well, and understand how they, closer to the end than Ruth, have had to delude themselves that they’d missed the boat. George had a job he didn’t want and eventually found himself in a marriage he’d rather avoid, instead working to pass a few evening hours in a mirage of marital bliss in another woman’s home. For her part, Helen had been a stage star but finds herself bed-ridden when she is no longer considered for roles.

George and Ruth have retreated from the stresses of trying to make something work in their life. Unfortunately, they feel they can now rely heavily on their daughter, threatening to erode her life as well.

In the country of the old and sick there are environmental hazards. Cautious days. Early nights. A silent, ageing life in which the anxiety of the invalid overrides the vitality of the untouched.

Ruth is not the type of woman who will confidently take the world by storm, either. She is not particularly attractive to the men she knows, and she certainly hasn’t learned much from her parents, who don’t really understand their strange daughter. She’s of that temperament that feels disappointment keenly and still manages to say, “I’m very lucky, really.”

But Ruth does feel a desire to spread her wings, to have, well, a start, though deferred, in life.

In her blue dress, in which she had not taken Paris by storm, and her wool coat, Ruth felt shabby and obedient. The girl wore trousers and a pullover, the man a well-cut suit of tweed. A great desire for change came over Ruth and a great uncertainty as to how this might be brought about. For she knew, obscurely, that she had capacities as yet untried but that they might be for ever walled up unless her circumstances changed. Love, she supposed, might do it, but there was no one with whom she might fall in love.

A Start in Life is an intelligent exploration of lives eroding from circumstance, and the stories folks tell themselves to get by. The characters are delightful and frustrating and painfully real. I’m ready for more Brookner.

Review: Altered States

[I'm up to number 16 in my chronological re-read of all of Anita Brookner's 24 novels.]

As I sat down to write this review this morning I found I needed to go over the second chapter pretty closely because I was getting some of the names and relationships a little bit confused. As I wrote who was who on the back of an envelope, it struck me as a bit Trollopian. I'm currently re-reading Dr. Thorne and Brookner's relationship matrix in Altered States began to make me think of Trollope's intricate social and familial networks. Brookner's hero Alan's mother Alice was the second wife of the father of her friends Sybil and Marjorie. Sybil and her husband Bertram have a daughter Sarah who is not just Alan's obsession but also the obsession of Jenny the childless Polish wife of Sarah's uncle (and Bertram's brother) Humphrey.

Got that?  Of course Trollope would have littered it with a few sirs and ladies but the feeling was the same. The fact that Brookner has Alice re-reading The Claverings and quoting Lady Mason from Orley Farm kind of makes the connection feel complete.

In some ways it isn't all that important to really remember who any of the characters are since the plot distills rather simply down to Alan's obsession with Sarah. Even the life and untimely death (not a spoiler) of his wife Angela is secondary to the presence, and absence, of Sarah. My oversimplification is meant to summarize rather than discount the fine detail that Brookner puts into the cast of characters and how they interact with and impact each other. In fact, all the other relationships seemed much more compelling than anything Sarah was involved in. Perhaps that is because I can get a little bored with unrequited love, but as I sit now thinking of it, it seems as if the main event--Alan's fixation on Sarah--is really secondary to the rest of his life, at least as the reader sees it. No doubt the rest of the cast is secondary in Alan's mind, but surely, it could be no accident that those are the people and relationships that Brookner really explores. Sarah spends most of the book offstage and never makes much of an impact when she is on the scene. 

Alan's ill-fated marriage to Angela, one of Sarah's acquaintances, is one of those perfect Brooknerian sequences in which someone finds themselves married without really knowing how or why. Angela certainly trains her sights on Alan until he finds himself somehow engaged and then married. It's possible he gets married to forget about Sarah, but it seems more likely that she simply wore him down. As the happy couple head off into their life together Alan seems to want to be alone.

I longed for nothing but a cup of good strong tea, preferably drunk in complete silence. Angela, I knew, would sit up half the night dispatching pieces of wedding cake, the very cake that was giving me such unaccustomed indigestion. I wondered if there were any precedent for a bridegroom wanting to spend his wedding night on his own.

The fact that this was more or less the high point of their marriage says quite a bit. But, as I alluded to, Altered States really isn't about Alan's marriage. There is a matrimonial tragedy that Alan has to live with the rest of his life, but stronger than any remorse or regret is an underlying sense of I wonder where Sarah is.