Hotel du Lac
Jones, Robert
Romancing the novel HOTEL DU LAC Anita Brookner Pantheon Books, $13.95 184 pp. Robert Jones ROMANCE NOVELS are one of the most conservative forms of fiction, but even they have made...
...No matter how many frogs Anita Brookner kisses in her scavenging of English literature, she will hot, on the basis of Hotel du Lac, conjure her prince...
...It is not Edith's oft repeated desire for the "lure of domestic peace" that is troubling...
...But in doing this, Brookner leaves herself open to criticism that goes beyond that usually reserved for popular fiction...
...Just as one cannot lie awake at night and dream of rescue by a handsome stranger with any hope of realization, one cannot wish oneself to seriousness as a writer...
...it is the sense in the novel that Brookner believes she is making significant statements about human motivation...
...more than in any other form of writing, the dimensions of its world are determined by the demands of its audience...
...Mass-audience gothic novels once included among their characters orphaned governesses with a penchant for handsome landowners...
...It can be read guiltlessly on the subway without a brown wrapper to hide its cover...
...It presumes to be about love, but it is more rightly about the compulsion to be respectable...
...At one point in the novel, Edith exclaims, "the facts of life are too terrible to go into my kind of fiction...
...She wants desperCommonweal: 502 ately to be taken seriously, yet there is not a single original idea or image in her work...
...Edith Hope has the leisure to reflect upon what she wants out of life during her sojourn at the Hotel du Lac...
...But the cumulative effect of the stock characters and the lifeless prose only serves to exaggerate Brookner's distance from her idols...
...Humphrey Ward, that purveyor of countless volumes of pretentious Victorian entertainments...
...Brookner raises one's suspicions from the first page, and we trust her again only because the territory she travels continues to clang with familiar associations...
...But to those of us in the twentieth century without access to a post-Renaissance wit, Hotel du Lac seems humorless to the point of perversity...
...We know that even the skeletons rattling in Edith's closet are bound to be respectable ones and that we have encountered them innumerable times before...
...Romance novels are primarily science fiction for the lovelorn, and, as pacifiers, they satisfy our most powerful, juvenile fantasies that there will always be rescue from danger and the promise of redemptive love...
...And my readers certainly do not want them there...
...It may seem niggling to object to a parallel between "anesthetized" and "etherized" seventy years after the fact, but I think this mirroring of Eliot is significant in terms of Brookner's limitations as a writer...
...Edith Hope is the stereotypical English spinster, the one whose emotional life is as tightly coiled as the hair she predictably wears wound into a French bun...
...now even in the world of Harlequin romances, the heroine is allowed a career in the larger world and may swoon less coyly at the feet of the dashing bodice-ripper...
...This may indeed be the case...
...It is one of those curious instances where an image, a description, or even a word "belongs" to a writer and its use by anyone else seems derivative or gratuitous at best...
...Eliot's opening to "Prufrock" is not the sort of image that ever enters the library of available metaphors to be checked out by writers needing a quick fix of inspiration...
...And it is Brookner's misreading of Woolf to think that if she writes constricted descriptions of landscapes and sunsets which ceaselessly provoke Edith to fits of reverie, she, too, will be mistaken for Virginia Woolf...
...If the view of love expressed in these novels is not often found in personal experience, and if its view of the behavior of men and women ignores the subtleties and ambiguities of human behavior, they satisfy a need for spurious excitement in much the same way as soap operas and mini-series do...
...it is too personal and too jarring...
...Even Brookner's adjectives are somber: grey and pale countenances abound, as do variations of the term "Bloomsburian" to describe the drawn lines of Edith's face...
...Her references to the most renowned writers of the century, either directly or by image, seem designed to stake her own claim to membership in that tradition, as if she might sneak in by association since she has done her homework...
...This sentiment is true enough for Barbara Cartland, but it is inappropriate for anyone who pretends to believe in the necessity of writing fiction...
...And so she returns to England, alone...
...If she has a parallel in English literature, we should not look to Virginia Woolf, but to Mrs...
...She nearly succumbs to the loveless proposal of one of her fellow guests, until she witnesses him making a predawn exit from another woman's suite...
...Edith Hope likes nothing better than to be mistaken for Virginia Woolf...
...This metaphor is meant to set the tone of the novel, but it is unnervingly similar to the idea Eliot used to rather notable effect in "Prufrock...
...But for all of her quiet talk about seeking the simple routine of a house in the country so that she might write, Brookner through Edith supplies the much scorned reader who lies awake at night reading romances with a more literate version...
...In this regard, Brookner is very much like Anne Tyler on our own shores...
...She leaves a spurned fiance and a married lover in her wake...
...Hotel du Lac is the kind of fiction that often wins awards because it gives the illusion of being "literary" without unsettling us by its vision or eliciting any response but a sigh of received ideas...
...Hotel du Lac has been immensely popular because it masks our most sentimental instincts in an aura of seriousness...
...The idea for Hotel du Lac is a brilliant one...
...But should a Victoria Holt or a Mary Stewart, the two best and most dependable writers of popular romance, ever develop pretensions to a ward-winning seriousness, or should they dress their cliches in literary allusions and ponderous prose, they would instantly be transfigured into the persona of Anita Brookner, one of the United Kingdom's most successful recent exports...
...Their entertainment value is that they claim no relationship whatsoever to life as it is lived by anyone but the most hopeless daydreamer...
...There is nothing in Hotel du Lac which gives the impression that Anita Brookner feels any different about writing than Vivienne Wilde, references to Virgina Woolf notwithstanding...
...Hotel du Lac teeters under the puniness of its ideas...
...Hotel du Lac panders to the sentimentality of every undergraduate majoring in English literature: to find a Leonard to play to one's Virginia...
...We are bored by the secrets of her past before we discover them...
...Nor does Brookner's "borrowing" suggest the playful allusions used frequently by someone like Joyce...
...Robert Jones ROMANCE NOVELS are one of the most conservative forms of fiction, but even they have made concessions to the social revolution of the twentieth century...
...In Brookner's latest novel, Edith Hope, a writer of romantic fiction under the nom de plume of Vivienne Wilde, flees England in disgrace for the Hotel du Lac...
...To have a writer of romantic fiction overwhelmed by her own failures in love could be a fruitful, ironic ground to question the passionate excesses to which we are all victim: But the ability to play the pat world of gothic romance off against the messier confines of real life would require a sensibility that sees human behavior with insight and irony...
...After she won the Booker Prize for the best novel of the year, Brookner was quoted in the English press as suggesting that her humor derived from the seventeenth century...
...There is a bogus quality to Brookner's writing that is apparent from the first page where we find the image of a lake spreading out like an anesthetic...
...If this is specious as fantasy, it goes a long way, like being read Mother Goose as a child, to helping one sleep at night...
...The popularity of the fiction lies in its predictability...
...There is no peril in selecting a romance novel: the reader is guaranteed a happy ending, and no anti-nuclear activists or homosexuals will be numbered among its characters...
...To make Edith "modern," Brookner adds a whiff of female emancipation at the novel's end, as if the idea of a woman living independently occurred to her in a revelatory fever...
Vol. 112 • September 1985 • No. 16
