Word: brookner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Anita Brookner...
...sixth novel, is a swift little breeze of a book that buffets the pretensions of critics who condescend to popular art. Richard is a fussy young teacher at an obscure English university who becomes obsessed with an older, well-known woman novelist -- a figure like Muriel Spark or Anita Brookner. But unlike most of the weedy egotists who make convenient satirical heroes, Richard manages to possess his idol, whom he refers to as JL, and even marry...
...love for Tissy, Lewis remains ensnared in the "tight, small circle of her limitations." Within the tight, small limitations of the novel, there are many grace notes. But Brookner's depiction of Lewis' times is not sustained enough to suggest any greater significance...
Such a sensitive male is an unusual protagonist for Anita Brookner, the * acclaimed British novelist who won the 1984 Booker McConnell Prize for Hotel du Lac. Most often she focuses her exacting eye on women, solitary spinsters picking their way through uneventful but carefully examined lives. Lewis Percy is reminiscent of all of those awkward, hapless English twits, those Lucky Jims who comically court failure in the farcical novels of Kingsley Amis, William Boyd and David Lodge. But though it has brisk satirical asides, Lewis Percy is a halfhearted comedy. We cannot sympathize for long with so ineffectual a hero...
...Brookner, who is often compared with Henry James and Barbara Pym, has written better novels. Her best works juxtapose exquisitely etched character miniatures against a larger canvas. In Family and Friends (1985) and Latecomers (1989), her protagonists interact with small gestures in narrow worlds, but in the background World War II looms as a haunting menace. Set in the '60s and '70s, Lewis Percy is buffeted by the winds of fads. Tissy becomes a support-group feminist ("Last week they got to know their bodies. This week they're getting in touch with the pain"), and his boss...