Understated Outrage at Growing Old

...Sophie has served only for a brief interregnum as the romantic lead that Fanny has filled in Herz' imagination since his early teens...

...The younger son accepted this burden without complaint because of "his own need to make things better...

...Indeed, Herz is memorable because he is so hard to categorize, such a bundle of contradictions, some invisible to him but made clear to the reader...

...The renewal brings him some happiness and a cluster of uncertainties and reservations about the propriety of such happiness: "He told himself that his interest in her was paternal, although he was alive to her beauty, as any man would be...

...He had no children, no grandchildren, and this girl, in her late 20s or early 30s, might have been a grandchild...

...After his divorce, he traveled heartsick and headlong to the Beau Rivage, a Swiss lakeside resort hotel in Nyon where the widowed Fanny and her mother, Herz' maternal aunt, splendidly resided...

...It is also true that all of Brookner's novels betray a certain similarity in mood and content...

...Herz meets and observes Sophie for a while, then discovers "that after years of inanition he was able again to feel desire...

...My German is now rusty, and somehow I do not see myself making representations to a German lawyer...

...Herz inhabits the present but dwells in and on his past...

...What would I do there...

...Fanny is now living in Bonn, widowed a second time, and her late husband's relatives are taking legal steps to keep her from any of the inheritance...

...That, at any rate, is how Herz views matters nearly 50 years later...

...Or does his eagerness to "fashion" Fanny "into the companion of his dreams" reveal him as formidably selfish in his own right, interested in others only insofar as they conform to his expectations and satisfy his hopes...

...I have no head for business but I can certainly fight for my rights and my conscience is clear...

...This reflection aroused others: regret for his past blamelessness, together with a fierce desire for some sort of reward before it was too late...

...Appalled and ashamed, Herz bids farewell once again to sexual ambition: "He would no longer look at a woman with appreciation, with approval...

...He did not adduce blame here, merely knew that he had persistently, and so mistakenly, cast the present, and indeed the future, in terms of the past, when he had been young and viable...

...My one fear is that this letter may not reach you, but I know that if you are still as I remember you, you will do your utmost to help me...

...Or, as frequently turns out in Brookner's novels, it may lead merely to a keener, more nuanced apprehension of failure...

...Gentle comedy is at play here, as is an understated outrage at the afflictions of time, the necessity of growing old...

...The devastated parents could not even bring themselves to visit him: "The burden was shifted to their younger son, who became guardian to all three of them, unaware of his own entitlements...

...Freddy, the family's bright hope, suffered a collapse of some sort and had to live away from home...

...Finding the answer may help them escape the prison of unsatisfied desires and unfulfilled expectations...

...He was now paying the price for being an anomaly, an old man in love...

...And I do not know that I want to see you as you must be now...

...Fanny's letter tells a sad story...

...Their emotional neediness and selfishness stifled him...

...Herz may be comfortably well-off now...

...His parents and Freddy are long-since dead, but he cannot stop thinking about them with a mixture of baffled love and resentment...

...Herz' determination to "make things better" may be deluded, yet it also, given the odds against it, carries a hint of heroism...

...They subsequently settled in London, where a family friend gave Herz' father a job managing a record store...

...Ever since, for some 30 years, Herz has dawdled emotionally over this adventure: "It fulfilled the function of the youthful indiscretion of which one is somehow proud, although he was a middle-aged man when it had come about...

...As his new desolation is settling in, the second event occurs...

...Clearly," he muses, "supreme selfishness was the recipe for a successful life...

...Then he tears up that letter and writes and mails Fanny something markedly different: "Unfortunately I cannot come to Bonn, but we can choose some halfway house where we can be at our ease...

...A nonfiction writer would have to take a position on the issue, but a novelist is free to portray unmediated complexity...

...And Brookner stands guilty of being astonishingly productive...

...The parents were miserable with each other and with their straitened lives, compared to those they led in Berlin...

...Invariably, too, some unforeseen change in their circumstances forces them with new urgency to discover why...

...Such are the perils of prolific authors...

...The elderly man's dissatisfied present existence is rattled by two events...

...Remarkably, she was 53 and had established a reputation as a distinguished art scholar before she turned to fiction and launched an even more impressive second career...

...his family's old benefactor left him financially independent...

...Since then she has published it again, slightly altered, almost every year...

...Herz extends this invitation on an impulse that quickly blossoms into a vision of his future, a glorious release from the tedium and pointlessness of his London existence...

...Reviewed by Paul Gray Former senior writer, "Time" magazine Last June, when the British edition of this book was published, the London Review of Books' assessment began as follows: "Anita Brookner's first novel appeared in 1981...

...He writes Fanny a harsh reply, brimming with bitterness: "I cannot, I think, come to Bonn...

...Herz is realist enough to know that Fanny's letter was motivated by her survival instincts rather than by any fondness for him...

...Early in the novel Brookner writes of her 73-year-old hero: "At heart he was still a young man, a boy even, to whom adulthood had come as a surprise and had never ceased to be a burden...

...He used to loiter around her parents' house in Berlin hoping for glimpses of her, which came, and for her attention, which didn't...

...Herz receives an unexpected letter from Fanny, the cousin he was dreaming of at the novel's opening...

...that his unhappiness stems from his virtuous obedience to and awareness of the needs of other people-meant to be the correct one...

...Once there," he imagines, "and becalmed, as he somehow knew he should be, he would allow himself to be absorbed into the surroundings, would recover his dignity, would realize his destiny as an exile, and perhaps acknowledge the lightness of the solution...

...Why shouldn't he and Fanny meet at the Beau Rivage and then simply stay for the remainder of their days...

...The same can be-and has been -said about the works of Henry James, the writer whose fiction Brookner's most closely resembles...

...Fanny had further prompted the single most audacious, romantic gesture of Herz' life...

...What about the Beau Rivage...

...The peeved tone is hard to miss, although the critic goes on to register several qualified approvals of her latest work...

...He would wean Fanny from her preoccupations, fashion her into the companion of his dreams...

...Her mother, her lifelong protector, has died...

...First, an attractive young woman named Sophie Clay moves into the flat a floor below his...

...The novel transpires entirely within the troubled mind of Julius Herz, 73, who dreams one night of an imagined meeting with his cousin, Fanny Bauer, "the love of his life," when both were young...

...I wonder if you could suggest how I should proceed," she writes...

...Exile saved their lives but did not make them happy...

...I remember that you found this comfortable, and I was favorably impressed during the brief time I spent there...

...Herz does not welcome his return to consciousness and to the dawn of the here and now: "Only the relentless ticking of his clock informed him that he had woken up, that this would soon be a new day, all too closely resembling the others, the normal days of his present existence, in which nothing happened nor could be expected to happen...

...Making Things Better follows this narrative arc, but with particular dexterity and suspense...

...she turned him down and sent him obediently back to England...

...He tries to dismiss Fanny's request from his thoughts and pays her a sarcastic tribute: "He felt for her the same gratitude that he had briefly felt for Sophie Clay: She had put an end to his fantasies of love, something that she had not quite managed to do in Nyon...

...But his freedom from the task of supporting himself has left him "bereft," roaming London streets with no purpose, reminded by every apparently happy person he sees that he "has wasted his life...

...He proposed marriage to Fanny...

...He, his parents and his older brother Freddy, a prodigy on the violin, got out of Berlin in the 1930s when the Nazis' intentions toward Jews became disquieting...

...reviewers eventually weary of them...

...SINCE ALL of Making Things Better is conveyed through Herz' point of view, it is difficult to get at the truth of his character...

...As his memories accumulate, it becomes clear that he is, in most measurable ways, a fortunate survivor of his family's history...

...Is his self-diagnosis-i.e...

...The fourth, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker Prize in 1984...

...Making Things Better is her 21st novel...

...his sense of family responsibilities crippled his marriage to Josie, which ended in an amicable divorce after a little more than two years...

...The problem is that Herz can only sustain his passion by keeping it secret from Sophie, its inspiration and object, and he stumbles badly, if innocently, at this task...

...Her protagonists, female or male, invariably suffer from a pained awareness that they have missed out on the fullest possibilities of life...