Latecomers:

...For one thing, Fibich continues throughout the novel to seek enlightenment, some form of spiritual illumination that will make sense of the horror underlying his past...

...And, just as importantly, she brings them through with wit and compassion, allowing readers to breathe freely of her mannered airs...

...The only true "latecomer" is Toto, and what he's come to is a life as depressing in many ways as his father's...

...Does Fibich's example prove that you can't in fact ever escape the burden of memory...

...He recognizes "at last that his purpose in life had been not to find his own father but to be a father himself...

...Simply, as we learn in the very first words of the novel, Hartmann is a "voluptuary," a hedonist with a religious devotion to "the perfecting of simple pleasures...

...Nothing really happens here...

...In adulthood, much to the Hartmanns' disappointment, Marianne has become bovine, a passive wife and mother, whose boring husband dictates a puritanical way of life completely foreign to his well-heeled in-laws...

...she nevertheless continues to traverse familiar terrain-the landscape of the inner self...

...Not surprisingly, the Fibichs prefer Marianne's quiet demeanor to their son's unabashed egotism, which of course the Hartmanns admire and encourage...

...However, one needs to resist taking Hartmann's cheerful refrain throughout the book ("Look...

...We have come through...

...rld of disbelief...

...By comparison, the Hartmanns' only child, their pretty daughter Marianne, displays none of her mother's animation nor herfather'syoiedev/vre...

...Consider the final ambiguous comment Fibich writes to Toto in the letter which ends the novel: "If I were a religious man I would ask God to bless you...

...More learned and serious than his carefree friend and eventual business partner, Fibich is haunted by his past, which manifests itself in his bad dreams, his insomnia, and his constant stomach problems...

...Although he never rewrites the past, Hartmann never gives it much thought, and carries on with a certain insouciance...

...Fibich, the darker of these "twin souls," is given to endless worry and woe...

...As much a mother as a helpmeet to her hapless spouse, she is something of an "anachronism," clearly an admirable quality in Brookner's polite world since it implies all the lost virtues of the past- honesty,, simplicity, and faithfulness...

...Her blissful ignorance of the actual circumstances of her childhood- her fatherwasaFrench collaborator whom her mother abandoned-turns, much later in her life, into a pathetically comic rejection of the truth...

...Though he inevitably fails in his quest-how can he experience true revelation without religious belief?-he arrives at some hard-won insight...

...But before this slim fiction expends itself, Brookner has taken her four "latecomers" into their dotage, decades beyond the youthful traumas which shaped their later selves...

...as proof that they have not merely survived, but have succeeded brilliantly it overcoming their "bad starts" in life...

...Yvette Hartmann, on the other hand, skitters along the surface of things, another version of Brookner's much-cherished "old-fashioned" woman, one who adheres to the "feminine codes" of pre-liberatory times-fastidious grooming, tasteful homemaking, and the promise of never changing...

...In short, he becomes "their apotheosis.'' Many reviewers justly in awe of Brookner's elegant and graceful prose have rushed in to proclaim Latecomers a breakthrough in her development as a novelist, not just because her protagonist isn't a spinster-after all, that was true of Family and Friends-but because here her characters seem to triumph by will over adversity...

...After a lifetime of introspection, he discovers "that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home...

...Meanwhile, Toto's adolescent hauteur evolves into something unpredictable: once prodigy and prodigal, he begins to show " the faint tracings of the melancholy that had so overwhelmed his father at the same age...

...All of which turns his thoughts to his only child, his grown son, Toto, by then a successful actor who throughout his life frightened his lackluster parents with his stunning beauty and charisma...

...And as I am not I will ask Him just the same...

...After years of entertaining the notion, his search takes him back to Berlin, the scene of his primal abandonment...

...As she did once before in Family and Friends, Brookner here concentrates on more than a lone and lonely woman...

...No, Fibich, like Hartmann, never transcends his past, nor does he arrive at any real understanding of it, he simply manages to survive in a world of disbelief...

...Hartmann's and Fibich's disparate temperaments are reinforced by their choice of wives, two "old-fashioned" (to use Brookner's favorite adjective) women with semi-tragic childhoods but radically different sensibilities, who nevertheless manage to remain as friendly to each other as their husbands are...

...Latecomers is more than a series of clever but static character studies...

...For all the quiet desperation in her novels of thwarted female passion-that describes six of her previous seven books there is an artistic consciousness behind her vulnerable and pathetic heroines that's always in full control, and consequently more bemused than befuddled...

...In other words, it seems to me that Brookner's generally bleak vision of things isn't seriously diminished here, though the richness of her observation and narrative skill might tempt one to think so...

...Unlike the frivolous Hartmann, the melancholic Fibich spends more time analyzing his life than living it, though together these two refugees build a most successful photocopying business, and yoke their futures in an unusual way: Their strange symbiosis, which finds them inhabiting adjoining flats all through their married lives, conceals an implausibility...

...And Hartmann finds her all the more charming on account of it, even though her prized figure has filled out, and age has registered its indelible marks...

...Hartmann, of course, asks himself no such questions...

...little gets said...

...In less capable hands, Latecomers would be suffocating, claustrophobic in its relentless examination of some decidedly minor lives...

...Why would someone of Hartmann's disposition, valuing the present above all else, carry along such a gloomy reminder of his mostly forgotten past...

...Thomas Hartmann and Thomas Fibich share more than first names: Both were sent as children to England from Nazi Germany, while their parents remained behind and were eventually killed...

...Christine Fibich would have been a nun, if she believed in God...

...His belated acceptance of his "mysterious and even dolorous inheritance" brings a "strange and dignified form of recognition" to his timorous parents...

...Meeting at a typically oppressive British boarding school, Hartmann and Fibich forge a bond that manages to transcend their differences, which compound over time...

...A dandy and gourmand, he remains through-outmostof his life "deliberately euphoric" as a way of screening out the unpleasant, the undesirable, and the unavoidable...