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Anita Brookner

Toward the start of Brookner's "Lewis Percy," a young man returns from Paris to London to take care of his ailing mother:

On his return to London Lewis was briefly amazed by the quality of the light, which seemed to him poor, as if the day could not work up enough energy to throw off the darkness of dawn. Used as he was to the fine grayish mist that cloaked Paris on the worst days of bad weather, he had frequently to rub his eyes in this land of what seemed to him ruminative half-shadow. He supposed that he needed glasses. Gradually, imperceptibly, he became accustomed to London's muted tones, and to the wistful noise of a car passing along a street sunk in the slumber of mid-afternoon. For a few weeks he wandered about his neighborhood, registering new facts or facts which he had forgotten. He was struck by the modest cheerfulness of the people, whose main efforts seemed to go into keeping the business of life ticking over. "Mustn't grumble," they said, when asked how they did. "Can't complain," as if to complain were to be caught out in an unpatriotic, an un-English activity....

-First, Brookner reminds me of Lorrie Moore. Moore likes to point out the Midwestern response: "Sounds good!" A response that means more than it seems to mean. A response that often means: "Sounds neutral!" or "I guess I have to do that because you're making me do it!" In Brookner, "Can't complain" means "I'm complaining."

-Like Lorrie Moore, Brookner also lets her main character spill his feelings into the world. What do I mean? The start of "A Gate at the Stairs" has the narrator reflecting on "stricken birds" when really it's the narrator herself who is stricken. Likewise, Brookner's Lewis Percy detects feelings where there aren't feelings. A car noise isn't inherently "wistful." A street can't be "sunk in slummer." A shadow isn't "ruminative." These adjectives actually describe Lewis. To cope with his feelings, he attributes those feelings to non-living things.

-Like Lorrie Moore, Brookner creates a hero who isn't heroic. Though Lewis writes about great souls in nineteenth-century fiction, he himself is not a great soul. It's funny to see him "reflect" on his need for glasses: Notice that he doesn't actually buy the glasses. We see him bewildered, rubbing his eyes. When he says he is "amazed by the quality of the light," we expect there must be something stunning about that light, but in fact the stunning thing is simply that the light is "poor." Deflate, deflate, deflate. Who says you can't write a novel about a shlub like this? By choosing Lewis as her subject, Brookner is being contrarian.

-People say the early Brookner novels are the best. "Look at Me," "The Debut," "Latecomers." I look forward to each of these.

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