Anita Brookner - A Misalliance
Oct. 16th, 2017 08:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureLately I've started reading Anita Brookner, and the experience was a little like reading Barbara Comyns -- thinking at first that I didn't really like her novels, but then realizing they yielded more as I thought about them -- that they were less like literary gardens, already prepared for my wandering pleasures, and more like those paper seeds you drop into a glass of water, where they unfold slowly into complex blooms.
Impatient reading is dangerous reading.
Brookner's gift is for taking the humiliating social situation, the mismatch of desires between the protagonist and those she loves, and making of it something more profound. The crisis becomes an occasion for insight that rescues these books from simply being torture chambers for the extra-sensitive spirit. I find I usually have to put each book down multiple times during an awkward scene because I don't want to live through the whole agonizing experience -- and she does tell the whole thing through -- but Brookner, I've found, can be trusted, and she always makes something more of these scenes; the protagonist, no matter how unhappy, always gains from the loss.
A Misalliance shares the arc of many Brookner novels, or at least the ones I've read so far...
...Into a contained, orderly life enters an intriguing, irresponsible person (or couple) who at first seems to promise a more passionate, fulfilled existence. However, through a crisis of betrayal and disappointment, the protagonist bravely, more wisely, but not particularly happily, faces a solitary future.
These connections can be all sorts of alliances -- a lover, but also a thrilling friend or a child. What seems essential is that the connection be disappointing in the end.
However, that's not an entirely fair assessment of this novel, which ends more happily (or does it?) than most. Blanche is energized, rather than crushed, by her loss -- perhaps because she has already experienced a more serious injury: having been left by her husband for a person named Mousie.
In the case of A Misalliance, the mismatch of desires is between Blanche's desire to have someone to care for -- the child Elinor, who doesn't speak since her father went away, and whom the divorced Blanche both identifies with and wants to protect -- and the will of Sally, Elinor's stepmother, to be provided for by whomever has the available funds.
However, there's a second mismatch that comes to a crisis on the very final page of the book: Blanche's desire for the love of her ex-husband, Bertie (only sporadically worthy, in my opinion).
Brookner presents this final crisis as a possible catastrophe, or at least a deep irony, but since the author leaves the outcome open, I prefer to believe that Blanche goes alone to Paris the next day. I like very much, though, that Brookner features the problem of finally getting what you want when you don't necessarily want it any more.
A Misalliance also avoids the melodramatic plotting that makes some of Brookner's novels feel like a beautiful garment draped over an awkward hanger (Hotel du Lac, for example). A Misalliance is seamless in that respect. There's a bit of the absurd comedy of manners in places, and, as one expects in a Brookner novel, plenty of reflection on just how the protagonist has failed to live properly (usually despite appearing to live an enviable life in many respects.)
The misalliance of the title, then, serves more as a means for Blanche to work through her sense of having failed in comparison to more demanding women; the end of the misalliance seems somehow to help Blanche move out of these obsessive ruminations towards the idea of creating a life more satisfying to herself as a whole person. This is expressed in a throughline of Greek paganism. Blanche envies the women with "nymph's smiles" who seem not to care about anything other than their own pleasure; this slowly gives way to an image of herself as sun-worshipper -- "the sun is god." I read this as her excavating her own values and pleasures after many years of suppressing them in her marriage.
In the end, I've found other Brookner novels more satisfying, but this novel has quiet pleasures (and agonies) to offer.
{rf}
(Cross-posted from Goodreads)
Impatient reading is dangerous reading.
Brookner's gift is for taking the humiliating social situation, the mismatch of desires between the protagonist and those she loves, and making of it something more profound. The crisis becomes an occasion for insight that rescues these books from simply being torture chambers for the extra-sensitive spirit. I find I usually have to put each book down multiple times during an awkward scene because I don't want to live through the whole agonizing experience -- and she does tell the whole thing through -- but Brookner, I've found, can be trusted, and she always makes something more of these scenes; the protagonist, no matter how unhappy, always gains from the loss.
A Misalliance shares the arc of many Brookner novels, or at least the ones I've read so far...
...Into a contained, orderly life enters an intriguing, irresponsible person (or couple) who at first seems to promise a more passionate, fulfilled existence. However, through a crisis of betrayal and disappointment, the protagonist bravely, more wisely, but not particularly happily, faces a solitary future.
These connections can be all sorts of alliances -- a lover, but also a thrilling friend or a child. What seems essential is that the connection be disappointing in the end.
However, that's not an entirely fair assessment of this novel, which ends more happily (or does it?) than most. Blanche is energized, rather than crushed, by her loss -- perhaps because she has already experienced a more serious injury: having been left by her husband for a person named Mousie.
In the case of A Misalliance, the mismatch of desires is between Blanche's desire to have someone to care for -- the child Elinor, who doesn't speak since her father went away, and whom the divorced Blanche both identifies with and wants to protect -- and the will of Sally, Elinor's stepmother, to be provided for by whomever has the available funds.
However, there's a second mismatch that comes to a crisis on the very final page of the book: Blanche's desire for the love of her ex-husband, Bertie (only sporadically worthy, in my opinion).
Brookner presents this final crisis as a possible catastrophe, or at least a deep irony, but since the author leaves the outcome open, I prefer to believe that Blanche goes alone to Paris the next day. I like very much, though, that Brookner features the problem of finally getting what you want when you don't necessarily want it any more.
A Misalliance also avoids the melodramatic plotting that makes some of Brookner's novels feel like a beautiful garment draped over an awkward hanger (Hotel du Lac, for example). A Misalliance is seamless in that respect. There's a bit of the absurd comedy of manners in places, and, as one expects in a Brookner novel, plenty of reflection on just how the protagonist has failed to live properly (usually despite appearing to live an enviable life in many respects.)
The misalliance of the title, then, serves more as a means for Blanche to work through her sense of having failed in comparison to more demanding women; the end of the misalliance seems somehow to help Blanche move out of these obsessive ruminations towards the idea of creating a life more satisfying to herself as a whole person. This is expressed in a throughline of Greek paganism. Blanche envies the women with "nymph's smiles" who seem not to care about anything other than their own pleasure; this slowly gives way to an image of herself as sun-worshipper -- "the sun is god." I read this as her excavating her own values and pleasures after many years of suppressing them in her marriage.
In the end, I've found other Brookner novels more satisfying, but this novel has quiet pleasures (and agonies) to offer.
{rf}
(Cross-posted from Goodreads)
no subject
Date: 2017-10-16 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-17 05:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-17 11:41 am (UTC)Modern and post-modern capital-L Literature — and real life, I suppose — are like a quiz game where you never get to find out if any of your answers were correct.
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Date: 2017-10-16 07:56 pm (UTC)That is both a beautiful description and the kind of observation that makes me curious about an author, thank you.
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Date: 2017-10-17 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-18 01:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-19 02:18 am (UTC)