Anita Brookner: Brief Lives

When my wife and I traveled to London this past October, I was determined to do some purposeful book shopping. I wanted books I'd be unlikely to pick up at home and books that could carry the memory of the trip back with them. I was delighted, then, to find the white Penguin editions of Anita Brookner's novels. I already owned several of these editions, mostly from her work in the 1980s and 2000s, but there was a cluster from the 1990s that I'd somehow missed. It was a quick decision to grab them all and take them to the register.

The first I chose from the stack was Brief Lives. Its characters live in and wander through Chelsea, where we were staying, which was a lot of fun. It helped, too, that the novel's confident opening lines are so compelling!

Julia died. I read it in The Times this morning. There was quite a substantial obituary, but what immediately fixed my attention was the photograph, one of those studio portraits of the late 1930s or early 1940s, all huge semi-transparent eyes, flat hair, and dark lipstick. I never liked her, nor did she like me; strange, then, how we managed to keep up a sort of friendship for so long.

The opening chapter introduces us to the peculiar, uneasy relationship between the narrator, Fay Langdon, and Julia, a woman about ten or fifteen years her senior. They are drawn together by circumstance, not by affection: their husbands are partners, though Julia's is a bit higher up. As a result, the two women entertain together and occasionally holiday together, performing the social rituals expected of them. Julia's husband liked that his wife had a companion; Fay's husband liked pleasing Julia's husband. Fay accepted this arrangement as the life she was meant to live, the life that was supposed to make her happy. And for a long time she believed that it did, even as a few people close to her quietly knew otherwise.

But Brief Lives is not confined to reflecting on a single chapter of Fay's adulthood. After this opening, Brookner sends us back into Fay's childhood, where she begins, perhaps unconsciously, to justify the shape her life has taken. Her parents were simple, undemanding people who seemed content enough; after her father's death, her mother lost the will to go on, a quiet collapse Fay recounts without melodrama. Fay reflects on how both her own expectations and her mother's understanding of women's lives were shaped by the cinema, those projected images of romance, endurance, and reward. The chapter closes with Fay, now in her sixties, gently reproaching herself for still feeling a sense of longing:

On the whole my life has been very easy, very pleasant. I was a pretty girl, I married well . . . It all seems a long time ago. But what most women want I once had. I try to remember that.

As the novel unfolds, we watch Fay marry, unhappily. From the opening pages we already know that both she and Julia will become widows and, to the discomfort of both, remain somehow in each other's lives. We watch them age, aware of their diminishing options, and endure the pain of hope. Fay, in particular, tries to understand how she arrived where she is. Brief Lives is not, as I initially assumed, simply a book about a difficult friendship; it is about aging and the fear of doing so alone, about the uneasy tension between retreat and reinvention, and the anxiety that it may be already too late when one finally feels the urge to change.

It is also, unsurprisingly, a novel filled with astonishing writing. Brookner has an unmatched ability to translate emotional states into precise, quietly devastating observation. One small example, among many comes in one of Fay's description of the changing seasons:

Now when I look back, the English spring seems to me heartbreaking. I dread it every year, although nothing more can happen to me. I associate it, still, with a certain panic, as if events are moving at their own pace, not at mine. I think of spring as the most impervious of the seasons. Nothing in me responds to it: I simply bow my head and wait for it to be over, wait for it to deliver me into summer, when, for a little while, I can relax.

Again as usual, Brookner captures the distance between the life one imagines and the life one actually inhabits with brutal clarity:

Oddly enough it was not Charlie that I missed, but rather the person for whom Charlie had always been a substitute, whoever he was.

For all the precision of Brookner's sentences, however, the novel as a whole feels less airtight. Though I was always engaged, I sometimes found the narrative circular without going far, and I felt like Fay had her epiphanies on repeat. I also struggled to pin down Julia's exact role in all of this, though clearly she's front and center. Yet I came to see these uncertainties as part of the book's design. Fay's narration circles because her thinking does. Prompted by Julia's obituary, she revisits her life in a painful loop, allowing emotions to surface, suppressing them, and discovering that suppression itself has been one of her deepest injuries. As for Julia, I still don't entirely understand the relationship, and that lingering opacity feels essential. It remains unresolved, and therefore alive, after the final page.

Brookner's novels are treasures, frequently painful but somehow deeply sustaining. I'm very glad to have so many still waiting for me.