I read Anita Brookner with chagrin and fascination. I have never before been addicted a writer with whose values and vision I so consciously disagree. Every time a new Brookner novel published, I buy it the day it arrives -- in hard cover, no less. My life remains on hold until the new novel finished. Yet when I close the book, more often than not I am angry. How can she offer that, I ask myself again and again, as an image of life, of womanhood? One of the sources of my frustration Brookner's well-known belief that nice girls finish last -- that, as Edith Hope says in Hotel du Lac, life a race in which the hare wins every time. There some truth this, as there bitter truth the line from the Bible that could stand as a text for Brookner's fiction: Unto every that shall be given ...: but from him that not shall be taken away even that which he hath (Matthew 25:29). It's just that, in Brookner's vision, there little acknowledgment that decency, kindness, or generosity could characterize the hare, could coexist with happiness and fulfillment. For all her gifts, for all her brilliant academic and literary success, Brookner writes with the pain of exile. The daughter of Polish Jews, raised in London, she refers herself in her Paris Review interview as having always been unhappy, having always stood outside, and as one of the loneliest women in London (164). And, as she often has her personae say of themselves in their tormented attempts negotiate a path among the vibrant and self-assured, sometimes she gets it wrong; she lacks the information. Having a rich, eventful life need not demand -- as Brookner seems obsessively argue -- that be ruthless, designing, manipulative, self-centered, irresponsible, or showy. Yet paradoxically, Brookner's limitation are source of her great strength: hers not merely a neurotic, but in its cumulative effect a genuinely tragic, vision. All of Brookner's heroines are defined by lack. They exist, by their own choice, almost entirely within the patriarchal structures -- particularly the conventional heterosexual rituals of courtship and marriage -- that offer them only meager satisfaction. Their dream of simple happiness that expressed by Edith Hope: to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home in the evening. Every evening (98). Relentlessly unliberated, they wear their hearts on their sleeves, longing for men who are never worth the intelligent, fierce passion they expend upon them. Unloved or at best tolerated, they devise rituals of camouflage and attempted compensation, trying make up in painstaking dress, in the anxious preparation of meals for the beloved, in the careful application of the face, for lives they do not have. The cry of of them, Frances Hinton in the early novel at Me, echoes for them all: Look at ... at me (20). But as Luce Irigaray points out, the the predominance of the visual over the tactile that characterizes Western culture, and that at the base of Freud's castration theory and hence of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory altogether, condemns women sexually not only passivity but also nonentity. In the scopic economy, woman is be the beautiful object of contemplation. While her body finds itself thus eroticized ... her sexual organ represents the horror of see (26). Though Brookner eloquently reveals that behind or within the nothing see there plenty see, her novels about the hidden lives of women never really challenge this economy. Her women starve for a glance. The tragedy of her heroines, in fact, partly the wholeheartedness with which they buy into the symbolic order that excludes them -- excludes them not because they are unattractive, ungifted, or unlovable, but precisely because they want so much be included. …
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