Respectability Is Not Enough
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Respectability Is Not Enough Brief Lives By Anita Brookner Random House. 260 pp. $19.00. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" It is odd that Anita Brookner,...
...take what I give you and count yourself lucky...
...Perhaps I too could comply, if Brookner's analysis did not point to a regressive conclusion...
...I had disappointed him...
...Feminists might adopt Fay's plight as an object lesson demonstrating what a woman can come to if she considers herself incomplete without a male...
...Brookner's vivid in sights, unlikely as they appear coming from the languid Fay, may compensate readers for the lack of action, of dramatized scenes...
...Perhaps you would like to come for a meal one evening...
...should like that very much...
...Looking back at the age of 70, Fay remembers the hopes and dreams that she has tried to protect from the sabotage of her "friend," the former celebrated actress Julia, whose domination is ne ver fully explained...
...Some will argue that it does not quite fit her readiness to give Charlie, Julia's long-suffering husband, the drinks and cozier comforts he needs on the way home from work, but Fay always follows the line of least resistance...
...Is that enough, I ask, in 1991...
...I wanted a full life...
...Believing that to be true, she had asked, fatally, for the doctor's "cooperation.' Intensive analysis also occupies much of Brookner's earlier novels, but is relieved at far more frequent intervals by scenes directly portrayed...
...Women feel this dangerous amusement when a lover approaches: It eases the way forward into an emotion which is not amusing at all, which is in fact melancholy, uncertain, nearly always uncomfortable...
...In her passive way she has attempted to follow the conventional rules for pleasing a man, the only route she can imagine to a happy ending...
...Neither shall I. Did you think I was asking you to marry me?'" The doctor, who enjoys Fay's cooking, tends to depart after eating because he is in great demand socially...
...But even the most ardent readers of magazine articles advising how to get and hold a mate would scorn so supine a sister...
...We are present, for instance, at the funny, poignant interplay among Fibich and Hartmann and their families in Latecomers, the tale of a lifesaving friendship between two men who have in common only their childhood flight from Nazi Germany...
...Mind you,' headded, 'I shall never marry again.' "'No,' I replied, rather annoyed...
...If youare always hungry,' Isaid...
...Her faithful following in England and America may well swallow their rebellion and obey...
...Meditating on her husband's early loss of feeling for her, Fay recalls: "The occasional look of puzzlement in his eye, as if needing help from some unknown source, reminded me of a picture I had seen in the same museum through whose little garden I had walked every day: naked souls, their hands joined, the same look of discomfiture on their large-nosed faces, slipping out of the reach of God and his angels into the flames of hell...
...A more skillful woman would have avoided this...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" It is odd that Anita Brookner, a storyteller best known for Hoteldu Lac and an authority on 18th-century art, has given her latest novel a title made famous by the 17th-century writer John Aubrey...
...What Fay has been waiting for—before and after the death of her husband—is a relationship that will flesh out, quite literally, her barren existence...
...Although a part-time volunteer job gives her hours of relief from her sense of emptiness, she fails to recognize that full-time, purposeful work would complete and enliven the person within her...
...But I had always been impatient, susceptible...
...The farcical failure that ensues reveals Fay as all too human for the doctor's requirements...
...affair?—with Charlie I had felt conscious of being in a false position, yet had been stimulated, amused by the very unexpected turn events had taken...
...I saw also that it was not entirely his fault...
...I had thought the picture naive, applicable only to the century in which it was painted...
...Nevertheless, her misgivings grow and are about to force a break with Charlie when she learns that he has had a stroke and is dying...
...She seems to challenge the reader: "Forgo your commonplace expectations of fiction...
...I wanted happiness...
...association...
...Usually Fay's perceptions are more straightforward...
...An occasional glimpse of intrigue underscores what Brief Livesis missing...
...She tells, and tells in great detail, omitting no flash of observation, twist of reasoning, sudden cognizance of paradox...
...In one instance, Fay meets a distinguished doctor who recognizes her from her days as a minor radio chanteuse...
...now I was not so sure...
...As Fay returns to propriety she tells herself, "Respectability is as much as can be hoped for," and thus defines the limits of her vision...
...Just when he reaches the point of suggesting they spend a few days together at his seaside house, Fay lets an SOS from Julia disrupt her dinner preparations...
...Fay's case seems curiously dated, yet even in our times Brookner has no doubt observed many lonely, unenterprising women—albeit perhaps few so subtle in their thinking...
...Throughout my—what was it...
...She says of Julia, from whose self-centered tyranny neither she nor any of Julia's old-time theatrical hangers-on can escape, "She was not a very nice woman, but then neither am I." Actually, the word "nice" describes Fay accurately...
...And though all lives are brief in the light of eternity, the author's intense, moment-to-moment focus makes Fay's passage from bewildered bride to aging recluse, as well as the lives of those around her, seem long indeed...
...His "vivid, intimate and sometimes acid biographical sketches of his contemporaries," according to the Britannica, "convey a delightful impression of their easygoing author...
...all wecan do is live it in sad, pathetic dignity...
...In Brief Lives Brookner has apparently set herself deliberately to break the old writing rule: "Show, don't tell...
...Yes,' she seems to say along with Fay, "life without a man is hardly a life...
...On the surface the narrative is simple...
...With her own husband dead, she accepts the solace fate offers...
...There is nothing easygoing about the voice of Brookner's narrator, Fay Langdon, as she recounts and analyzes her despairing quest for love...
...This one is not always able to procure for oneself...
...This time his departure is cold and final, leaving her to a night of self-flagellating lament...
...Later she reflects: "I had always wanted to be good, yet had turned out to be flawed...
...One does not give men sufficient credit for their hurt feelings...
...At that moment she sees life opening up before her...
Vol. 74 • October 1991 • No. 11
