Burdens of Longevity
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction Burdens of Longevity By Brooke Allen Certain authors are indelibly associated with particular subjects. John Le Carré, for instance, made the inbred world of Cold War espionage...
...that she is living in the 1970s, when the novel is set, seems inconceivable...
...Each young woman struggles with passivity, like any Brookner heroine...
...She is rebellious but feels unable to resist her mother's plans for her...
...hence its appeal," she says flippantly...
...Parents are responsible for bringing into the world their progeniture whether deliberately or carelessly and theirs is an unwritten covenant that the life of the child, and by descent of the child's child, is to be valued above that of the original progenitors...
...Like static characters in some Poussin painting or Canova frieze, her women float somewhere above the ground, too frequently observers ratherthan actors in their own dramas...
...A self-controlled businessman who has always half-longed for the archeological career he had originally planned, Adrian is a gentle and discreet soul whose belated breaking out comes as a genuine surprise and turning point in the novel...
...S23.95), carries a quote from the New York Times Book Review: "If Henry James were around, the only writer he'd be reading with complete approval would be Anita Brookner...
...What is her conviction when he comes from the wilderness and tells of the irreplaceable forest felled to make way for the casino...
...John Le Carré, for instance, made the inbred world of Cold War espionage his particular turf, to such an extent that the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the early 1990s seemed to leave him oddly bereft: What would he write about once Smiley and Karla had become irrelevant...
...The master of portraying this sort of dysfunctional female was Jean Rhys (1890-1979...
...Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, were for many years deeply involved with resistance to the system...
...Preciosity should be used very sparingly in literature...
...It was an authority that existed independently of its owners, and I understood instinctively how essential it was that such a house should be preserved, by the meanest calculation if necessary, by a loveless marriage, by a financial understanding...
...Emma accepts her inferior role without resentment...
...But this unimaginable concept of Life Time, the inconceivable: astate of existence which could-should never have happened, brings a knowing ofthat which was not admitted...
...It is above all the "classical code—reticence, sobriety, order" that attracts her...
...This book has plenty of elegant writing, but it occasionally descends into a near parodie version of Brookner's style at its most washed-out...
...The pestilent one, the leper...
...Paul and Benni are compatible...
...Gordimer succeeds in making her adoption of a black baby suffering from AIDS toward the end of the book more than a mere symbol (though it is that, of course...
...Though everyone behaves well enough, as we Americans have learned from our own postsegregation experiences, such carefully constructed facades often prove tragically fragile...
...As the story unfolds, we find it belongs equally to Françoise and to Emma, positive and negative characters confronting the same situation—the wish to leave home and choose one's own destiny, combined with the recognition of the value in continuity and tradition...
...Her part, she knows, is simply to be grateful for Françoise's attentions...
...I now saw that it guarded a secret, and if it enshrined a certain melancholy it also celebrated a divine proportion...
...No one could conjure that...
...Thus not only is Paul's illness a metaphor for pollution, but his quarantine is also a metaphor for segregation...
...if she fails to marry this wealthy man, mother and daughter will not be able to keep the family home...
...in fact, she beats the point almost to death: "Literally radiant...
...Emma compares L'Ermitage with a lost domain, reminiscent of the earthly paradise in AlainFournier's Le Grand Meaulnes...
...ANITA Brookner is another writer with a long career behind her: She has written 23 novels in just 24 years...
...the liberal use of sentence fragments...
...There was—is—no place for it there...
...As with Gordimer, Brookner's longevity has begun to work against her...
...Her agency serves corporate clients who build resorts in wild ecosystems too delicate to withstand such heavy development...
...Paul's relationship with his spouse is not entirely comfortable...
...We loved each other greatly, yet so exclusive was that love that it was experienced more like anguish...
...She will probably not survive to be the foremost novelist ofthat world, yet in spite of her many reservations, she means to welcome it...
...But not giving off light as saints are shown with a halo...
...In the end, the way Françoise deals with her fate is characteristically French, unlike Emma's approach...
...The emanation irradiates the hidden or undiscovered...
...Cancer of the thyroid gland...
...That term fits...
...Her self-loathing women sank to truly repulsive depths...
...it's a disembodiment from the historical one of his life, told from infancy, boyhood, to manhood or sexuality, intelligence and intellect...
...A similar challenge has faced writers who made their names under the apartheid system of South Africa...
...Lyndsay, a human rights lawyer, is generous and vulnerable...
...The jolly scenarios, however, always contain a tinge of stagey self-consciousness...
...Get a Life is frequently overwritten and portentous...
...Emma Roberts, Leaving Home's narrator, is as chaste and naïve as a Charlotte Brontë heroine...
...Judging from her new book, Get a Life (Farrar Straus Giroux, 187 pp., $20.00), Nadine Gordimer, too, seems to be floundering...
...So Paul returns temporarily to his first home and his first role—that of a dependent son...
...Garden design was at the furthest possible remove from a sensible life plan...
...Nevertheless, Emma notices parallels between her mousy self and the more outwardly glamorous Françoise...
...Had him by the throat...
...it was a role I knew well and could discharge automatically...
...and Berenice, the smooth advertising executive...
...I never knew a woman so inactive," Emma says of her mother, "her days reserved for reading and thinking...
...Etcetera, etcetera...
...Emma turns out to be rather less passive than one might have predicted, Françoise more so...
...If that is true (which I doubt), it says more about James' narrow tastes than about Brookner's fine writing: She writes very well within her limitations, but there can be no doubt that there are limitations...
...It's more than a physical and mental state of an individual...
...Among themselves, the adults are equally bland...
...She finally decides to go to Paris to study classical garden design...
...deliberately twisted syntax...
...Him, her man, or the client...
...The body as a metaphor for society is a wellworn trope, and Gordimer does not add anything very original...
...After all the heavy weather made of it, we are surprised to discover that Paul's quarantine will lastamere 16days...
...Slow Man, NL, September/October...
...She is, after all, 82 years old—a bit late in life for a writer to radically reimagine her fictional task...
...Her manner went with "the brightness of the air, the straightness of the streets, the ever-commanding perspectives of the city which she graced with such assurance...
...Artsy navel-gazing, the coy and showy search for exactly the right word, the right inflection, is entirely out of place here...
...One day at the zoo, for example, two children, one black and one white, start a cheerful chant: '"The see-al, the see-air Other visitors smile at the little scene, assuaging pleasantly their guilt of the past when the zoo was closed to blacks except on one day a week and black and white children did not chant together...
...This is "the world which I envisaged for myself and which I intended to inhabit, that world of straight lines leading to other straight lines in a design of perfect symmetry...
...Brookner's domain is more bloodless and stylized, in the manner of the French classicist painters who have been her scholarly specialty...
...Gordimer presents her country's social and ecological predicaments through one family, the Bannermans...
...Kundera has soldiered on, but intellectual life in Paris has made a poor literary substitute for the tragicomic adventures of oppressed Eastern Europeans...
...As this passage demonstrates...
...A virginity...
...The only daughter of a widowed mother, Emma has grown up in rare isolation...
...She is talking here about the classical gardens, but she might as well be talking about Françoise and her mother's way of life: rigid, tradition-bound, beautiful...
...Docility is the signature of a Brookner heroine...
...I could appreciate the symmetry which I had once thought rigid...
...Whom does Berenice believe...
...or underdevelopment...
...Paul and Berenice are not...
...She is that persona who has no need of convictions...
...In hospital he was kept in isolation...
...Her uneventful existence is interrupted, however, when she meets the vibrant Françoise, a girl of her age who works in the research library...
...Françoise is like a young tree in a French garden, ruthlessly pollarded for symmetry and regularity...
...Both girls understand the price demanded of Françoise while knowing it might well be worth it, for L'Ermitage, Françoise's family home, is something extraordinary...
...She recognizes, too, that the work is not only congenial to her but appropriate: She feels at home in "the docility of study...
...He lives in isolation, except for his selfsacrificing parents and their equally self-sacrificing family retainer, an old Zulu woman named (of all things) Primrose...
...She, too, has a subject—or in her case, a fictional archetype: the passive, introverted woman, often emotionally masochistic and sexually chaste...
...Initially, Emma is bowled over by Françoise, whom she identifies with Paris...
...Leaving Home contains, in other words, all of Brookner's strengths and all of her weaknesses—weaknesses that at this late date, it seems, will never be outgrown or transcended...
...The cover of Brookner's new novel...
...Who could have imagined that the author of July's People would have lived to see a brave new world of multiracial hipsters crowding the streets of South Africa's metropolises...
...It was, Emma feels, "a city which I knew instinctively to be too rich, too authoritarian, and too confident to accommodate unfledged creatures such as myself...
...as a result, Brookner has had to start setting her fictions in the past, when such women were more credible than they would be today...
...Like Paul himself, it has become not only threatened but a threat to others...
...It's a state of existence outside the continuity of life...
...The smart bourgeois world of enjoyment and consumption has expanded, apparently effortlessly, to admit the formerly excluded majority...
...Unwilling to let Paul risk the health of his wife and child, his parents, Lyndsay and Adrian, take him in...
...Largely dissatisfied with their unfulfilling lives, they appear strangely powerless to change them...
...Françoise, by contrast, suits it perfectly...
...In the end Le Carré was able to make a fairly smooth transition into new territory, but this was not the case for Milan Kundera, whose work lost almost all its punch after his native Czechoslovakia was liberated and the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, Kundera's crony and colleague, became president...
...A terrible lack...
...Leaving Home (Random House, 224 pp...
...Brookner is dark, but Rhys was much darker...
...Their affectations notwithstanding, we like some of these characters...
...He sees her as two people: Benni, the pleasant, informal wife and mother...
...Coetzee has met the challenge with mixed results (see my review of his latest novel...
...Meeting friends and colleagues of other races at fashionable restaurants, they smile and socialize as though this is the way life has always been...
...The radiant body of this idealistic ecologist stands for the endangered ecosystem he studies...
...She focuses most closely on Paul, a 35-year-old ecologist suffering from cancer...
...He radiates unseen danger to others from a destructive substance that has been directed to counter what was destroying him...
...But her choice goes deeper than that...
...Sometimes her stylistic contortions degenerate into pure self-parody: "Five years passed—a state of existence in which the question—if it is one, because a choice was made—doesn t sound from within...
...My very tact had a certain social value: I could be relied upon to be agreeable, to mingle without making a strong impression...
...Impossible to ignore, the subject dominated the nation's social discourse until the past decade...
...She is also an eminent art historian, and was the first woman to be named Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University...
...Apartheid is over, yes, and the country is doing its best to forget about it: The novel is full of "happy" interracial friendships and collaborations...
...The modulated and monotonous tone, the determined lack of dialogue, the avoidance of language that might be considered strong—all these stylistic habits create an aura in keeping with the classical gardens at the novel's center...
...He has undergone surgery and, as the novel opens, has been treated with a radiation therapy that will render him radioactive for a period of time, posing a danger to those who come near him...
...Here was space, lightness, beauty...
...Although life with her mother is hardly challenging, Emma is not immune to the almost universal human compulsion to leave home: She longs for escape without quite knowing what she is escaping or where she is headed...
...more than any of these, here was authority...
...Emma's experiences, particularly her often troubled friendship with Françoise, deepen her understanding of the country that is so attractive to her and yet so intractably foreign...
...The careers of South Africa's two Nobel laureates, J.M...
...Although it might be appropriate in a minute, Jamesian examination of the infinite ramifications of personal relationships, it grows irritating in a novel that aspires to deal with Big Issues like environmental degradation, race, and the perils of our historical moment...
...A kind of awful purity...
...But then, why shouldn't she flounder...
...In Paris Emma finds lodgings in a grim student dormitory and falls into a mostly solitary routine, befriending a gentle young man with whom she takes sexless Sunday walks in the gardens at Sceaux or Vaux-le-Vicomte...
...Gordimer has a fondness for "literary" airs of dubious value: the omission of quotation marks and question marks...
...She provides Françoise moral support, and her polite presence soothes the fearsome matriarch...
...Get a Life presents a portrait of the "new" South Africa that is hopeful, yet at the same time—and here one feels that Gordimer is not always wholly aware of the effect she creates— more than faintly disturbing...
...The end of apartheid left both writers, professionally speaking, high and dry...
...Françoise leads a double life: During the week in Paris she enjoys adventures and carries on numerous romances, while on Fridays she returns to the family manor house to spend claustrophobic weekends with her conventional mother and her mother's friends, including a man Françoise is expected to marry...
...It is altogether too much of a metaphor, and Gordimer has a hard time letting it go: "Imagine, an attempt to leave the state behind in this prison-home...
...Most interesting and attractive, perhaps because they are of a generation close to Gordimer's own, are Adrian and Lyndsay...
...It comprises an aging woman's sincere effort to love and comprehend a culture now changing faster than that of the rest of the globe, and her willingness to embrace the unknown future...
...What is it...
...This type was more prevalent 40 or 50 years ago...
...I was living a makeshift life, not unlike Françoise in her dingy flat, determined to live her own makeshift life away from that controlling desire to force her to conform...
...Part of me was resigned to this...
...Gordimer's career is clearly in a state of diminuendo, but for those who have taken an interest in her and her milieu, Get a Life will be worth reading despite its annoying qualities...
...The ever passive Emma soon assumes her own special place in this strange ménage at L'Ermitage...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
