A Loneliness to Binge On

I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at writers, immerse myself in their work. I’ve done this with Saul Bellow and Laurie Colwin, Richard Yates and Jean Stafford, and — it seems related to 9-year-old me — finishing “Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself,” then flipping back to the first page and starting it all over again.

Reading is an intellectual exercise (and as a writer, I can claim it as work), but I binge only when writers offer me pleasure. It’s less graduate seminar than love affair. I endorse this immersive way of reading, especially when it comes to Anita Brookner.

“I have said that I am one of the loneliest women in London,” Brookner told the Paris Review, in an interview published in 1987. “People have resented it — it is not done to confess to loneliness, but there it is.”

Readers who know Brookner will find this unsurprising: Loneliness, a thing often misunderstood as synonymous with unhappiness, is her métier. There’s plenty of both in her novels, but there’s so much more: an ironic wit, a cultured mind, a sensualist’s delight in detail, a casual, confident disregard for the rules of novel-writing. The fact of her loneliness is baffling when I consider how pleasant I find Brookner’s company.

Brookner was a first-generation Britisher — the only child of Polish Jews, born in 1928 — a position advantageous (or so I’ve long thought) for the writer of fiction. The child of immigrants understands her countrymen, while seeing them as they cannot see themselves. Brookner studied art history (with infamous Soviet spy Anthony Blunt), put out well-received scholarly books, joined the faculty at the Courtauld Institute of Art. A most impressive life. Then, at the age of 53, she published a novel. Those of us dismayed by lists of successful people under 30 should take heart. In the ensuing 28 years, she published 23 more (and one slim novella).

Learning these facts from Brookner’s obituaries in 2016, I was intrigued. I picked up her first book, “The Debut” (published originally as “A Start in Life”). Upon finishing it, I went to the Strand and bought copies of every one of her novels. I’ve had to ration them; they’re so brief they last me only two days and, besides, it brings me joy to know there are Anita Brookner works I’ve not yet read.

The prevailing criticism of Brookner is that her work is repetitive. There are concerns she returns to: the single woman who wishes not to be, the dutiful daughter overwhelmed by filial obligation, the family that is not unhappy but not quite happy. I find such intelligence and vitality in her books that it does not bother me that they amount to variations on a theme. Repetition is part of the particular pleasure; the books’ familiarity, as well as the cunning with which the author pushes herself to reinvent the form she’s chosen as her own.

My affection is rooted in the fact that Brookner’s hobbyhorses are my own. There’s food: “Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette.” (“Latecomers.”) There’s fashion: “Caroline undulated like a siren, clutching her bag, her scarves, touching her chains, her feet slipping about in ridiculously fragile sandals.” (“Providence.”) It should be boring, but it’s invigorating to see the most quotidian things through Brookner’s intelligent eyes. Her heroines go for long walks: “She was too lonely to sit in her room reading, too restless to work. She went back to Edith Grove and started walking from there, down to the river, along the embankment to Chelsea Old Church, all the way to Victoria and back to Sloane Square and along the King’s Road and into the Fulham Road until it got too late and she caught the 31 bus home.” (“The Debut.”) They find comfort in looking at art: “I wanted to look at pictures, either in the National Gallery or in the Wallace Collection. This last was a haven of coolness, even of gloom, yet it was deserted, except for discreet knots of American ladies looking at snuff boxes in glass cases.” (“Dolly.”)

I love fiction’s ability to allow me to inhabit a wholly different life. The narrator of “Dolly” passes the Christmas holidays alone at a hotel by the sea, so unable to bear the company of the other guests that she wanders the wintry beach alone for hours. Some readers will see this as bathos; I see it as bliss.

Brookner’s book jackets often suggest the texts are simply catalogs of genteel existence, and her mostly lackluster titles don’t communicate the books’ vivacity. She depicts women struggling to make lives for themselves or to make peace with the lives they have. They show us people who are mediocre — as most people seem to be — yet nevertheless interesting. If Brookner doesn’t seem, wholly, to understand sex, her books get at the oddness of intimacy, the way mere proximity or some other accident of circumstance can link one life to another, whether forever or just a fevered few months. In “Look at Me,” my favorite (thus far) of her novels, a woman who works at a research library is quite by chance taken up — then summarily dropped — by a fashionable couple. It’s a superb book about the complexity of human relationships.

I also see a lesson in the ways the author chooses to ignore the received wisdom about the novel as a form. There are long scenes in which little happens; there are hasty, expository sentences in which we’re informed that a character has died and years have passed. There is a parade of unlikable people; the title character in “Dolly” strikes me as one of the most complex and unpleasant I’ve ever met. There are odd devices; 1985’s “Family and Friends” tells a familial history by walking the reader through a photo album. Brookner is far more bold a writer than I think she’s given credit for.

It’s obviously a mistake to confuse the fiction for the artist, although my love for the former has become a deep affection for the latter. I admire her discipline, her life’s remarkable second act. I used to wish I could tell her this, that my admiration might make her feel, if fleetingly, less like the loneliest woman in London. I no longer wish that, as it seems disrespectful as well as wrong. Take my favorite book, “Look at Me.” I used to hear the title as an appeal; I now understand it as a dare.

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