Just like my sister Darlene (who just moved to Santa Cruz two weeks ago, hooray! All three of my sisters live here now!), I read an entire book on Friday. It was that kind of a Friday. A drug-yourself-with-literature kind of day.Oh, how I love picking up a book I’ve never read before and discovering that it’s just about perfect, page after page.
Anita Brookner’s one of my favorite authors. Favorite as in top ten favorites, or maybe even top five. Partly because her protagonists spend lots of time alone and overthink things, just like I do. Mostly because her language is so precise, not a drop wasted, which appeals to my tastes and sensibilities and inherent emotional thriftiness. I like to read her while also reading a detective novel or some kind of outrageous sci-fi thing. Makes me feel like I’m sampling a buffet of human experience, and few pleasures in this world can top it.
As of Friday, The Debut is my favorite Anita Brookner novel. This passage occurs right after Ruth makes friends with a young couple and starts having an affair with the husband:
“She had much to think about; that was what was so agreeable about kicking over the traces. That was what they did not tell you. It was no longer a question of whether she should or should not do such and such a thing but of whether she would or would not. Yet she was aware of something out of joint. She would have preferred the books to have been right. The patient striving for virtue, the long term of trial, the ecstasy of earned reward: these things would never be hers now. She was unworthy of them. She had deviated from the only path she knew and she had lost her understanding of the world before the fall. That there had been a fall she was quite sure. She had only to look at her glowing self to be assured of that. And selfishness and greed and bad faith and extravagance had made her into this semblance of a confident and attractive woman, had performed the miracle of forcing her to grow up and deal competently with the world. People seemed to like her more this way. The concierge waved from his window to her, night and morning. There was indeed much to think about.”
There must be hundreds of novels in which this exact same transformation occurs in a protagonist’s life, but most authors can’t pull it off with Anita Brookner’s subtlety or her gentle balance of humor and sadness. Especially not her economy of language and lightness of touch- with that one paragraph she shifted the novel in a new direction.
Anita Brookner, YOU GO GIRL!!!
I think I like Anita Brokner because it reminds me so much of you, as though I am there in your long spells of reverie.