Word: brookner
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...snug flat over the store. She is astute, self-sufficient and discreet. Occasionally, when the mood is on her, Rachel goes cruising, though she puts the matter even less romantically: "I go out, seek companions, bear them home . . . No bourgeois sentiments for me, no noble passions." Elsewhere, Anita Brookner's questionable heroine pitches her case more strongly: "I had resolved at a very early stage never to be reduced to any form of emotional beggary, never to plead, never to impose guilt, and never to consider the world well lost for love. I think of myself as a plain dealer...
...blamed if they keep an eye on the silverware. People who boast of their integrity bear close watching: they may not be outright thieves, but it is a good bet that their righteousness masks a shifty character. So A Friend from England is an ironic title, unless Brookner is deluding herself -- and there is not much chance of that...
...teacher at London's Courtauld Institute of Art. Her six previous novels include Hotel du Lac, the 1984 winner of Britain's top fiction award, the Booker Prize. Yet despite her finished style and genteel settings, she is as hard-boiled as any writer of detective fiction. Many of Brookner's principals are updatings of that familiar character, the English spinster as connoisseur of other people's behavior. Rachel is not only unattached but detached, a state that suits her analytical intelligence and chilly rectitude...
...Livingstones' request, Rachel nips off to advise her unofficial charge about the probable consequences of her Latin romance. The confrontation has the surprise effect of changing the polarity of Brookner's personality study. In an uncharacteristic show of spirit, Heather basically tells her friend from England to bugger off. Rachel's response is a revealing mixture of feminist hellfire and the ashes of envy. She uses her own disappointments with love and money as valuable object lessons at the same time that she accuses Heather of having it too easy: "Women don't sit at home any more, you know...
Heather, needless to say, goes off to the arms of her handsome illusion. Rachel retreats to her solitary world, where she will undoubtedly continue to practice self-deception about what is real. And Author Brookner? She can take a small bow for her own skillfully executed illusion...