Customer Reviews

Leaving Home

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a short and well written story by Brookner, similar in style to some of her other novels.

Anita Brookner (born 1928) is an English novelist and art historian. She was born in London to Polish immigrant parents. Many of her novels feature links to other European countries and immigrants to the UK.

Brookner was an only child and she never married. In her novels, many of her protagonists lead a solitary life, going through stages of emotional development. For example, her Booker novel Hotel du lac is about a novelist, Edith Hope, who is staying in a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva. The book follows that pattern: she gets involved with the other guests and undergoes emotional changes. Also, her parents were secular Jews, and a few of her characters have Jewish connections.

Without giving away the plot, the present novel follows the pattern of a single woman, again an only child, who grows up in London and moves to Paris.

There are few moments of high anxiety in the story. It is low key but well written and concise. I liked her prose and would recommend the book. She is similar to a few other English writers such a Barbara Pym, but not identical.

I am not surprised that some readers do not like the book. It is to be read and enjoyed for the writing as much as anything.

The title and back cover of Anita Brookner's novel suggest that this is about the perennial adolescent drama of breaking away from parental influences and leaving the nest. But this is only a small part of it. Emma Roberts, though younger than most of Brookner's protagonists, is already in her mid-twenties, and her quest is more a search for home than the leaving of it. She begins by moving to Paris as a graduate student of landscape architecture, staying first of all in a horrible student hostel, then taking a room in a small hotel. Later, she buys her own flat in London, and alternates between the two cities, discovering more about herself, even if only by coming to accept what she is not. The one home that she really envies is a country house belonging to the mother of her vivacious friend Françoise -- although the world of the French haute bourgeoisie makes her feel unworthy by comparison.

I suspect that this novel is more autobiographical than most; it also has personal resonances for me, since I was working on my own art history thesis in Paris at a similar age. Although I am a man, while Brookner writes so tellingly about women, I treasure her insight into the female mind. It is true that she confines herself to women of a certain class and mental disposition but, for me, that only increases the sense of authenticity.

Not for nothing is Brookner's scholarly field the late 18th-century watershed between French classicism and romanticism. Her characters always brush shoulders with romance, but opt instead for the comfort and predictability of classic balance, a quality which is also reflected in the cool elegance of the author's prose. This novel is, in effect, an ANTI-romance, a book in which few things actually happen -- or sometimes happen only to be reversed a few chapters later. There is a situation late in the book in which Emma, who has left her own maternal home, suddenly finds herself in charge of Françoise's home and ailing mother, while the daughter appears to have broken away entirely. But a few pages further, the situation has been stood on its head once more.

Such delightful realignments within a basically static universe give me the same fascination as a Calder mobile: a limited range of elements moving in relation to each other, seen now in this configuration, now in that, but always maintaining an essential balance. This applies as much to the delicate rhythm of Brookner's prose as to the subtle push and pull of her emotional plotting. For those who, like me, take pleasure in her quiet aesthetic, her novels create a unique atmosphere: a closed world, perhaps, but one that is totally absorbing and not the least depressing. The title of this book notwithstanding, there is a special satisfaction in completing the emotional circle: coming home again.

Classic Brookner. A reclusive, bookish, widowed mother. An introspective, timid, sheltered daughter. The little lives they lead enabled by lack of monetary worries and no real need to "do" much of anything save remain intropective. Emma wanders between Paris and London and falls into whatever situations / lodgings / friendships present themselves most conveniently to her. She's working on a book about classical garden design but remains oddly apart from anything lively and flourishing. She exists in a sort of gray vacuum. Boredom / ennui / lack of motivation is the theme. Even April in Paris can't jog Emma fully awake. Whatever. Reading Brookner is ultimately therapeutic. One's own little life always appears ever so much "more" after doing so. Thank you, Anita.

After writing 23 novels (a supreme accomplisment), AB's fiction has become formulaic; this is another emotional novel about a forlorn and isolated English woman, who fails to find love. Emma Roberts leaves home after her mother dies and lives briefly in Paris, returning to England and ultimately buying her own apartment, which could help her establish her own identity. But she doesn't do it, due to her weak nature and her penchant for being on the outside looking in at the other people in her life, including the French woman she befriends who finally marries and has a child. Emma ultimately completes her book on classic French gardens, a minor subplot hardly developed, with scant information on them. I call this book formulaic, because it deals with familiar themes, but it's actually alot weaker than the others, because Emma is a dim character with an uninteresting life along with the other characters in the book. I used to love her books so much, and now I wonder.

Since her Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac, Brookner has simply repeated her winning formula: lonely single Brit woman lives out her wretchedly monastic bookish life, in minute detail, page after page, making all the wrong, lonely sad choices (staying with the demanding mother; never leaving the family apartment, rejecting the suitor) so that you, the reader, can feel better by comparison. Read this on a rainy day. Or after you've been laid off. Or your boyfriend's left you. Brookner always makes you feel better, because you couldn't possibly be as miserable as her sad, lonely protagonists. When you're miserable, reading Brookner is like eating an entire bag of Mallomars. In bed. Alone. Except with, maybe, a cat.

I don't always rely on an author's pedigree to suggest whether or not I should read a book, but marketers definitely know what they're doing when they put "Best Selling Author of..." or "Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of...", etc, on the front cover of a non-award-winning book by the same author. While perusing the New Books sections at my library with crooked neck, surveying the titles, the name Anita Brookner caught my eye. "Didn't she...?" I thought to myself, unable to finish the thought confidently. And then I saw it on the front cover, confirmation that I had indeed likely heard of her (though I had never read another book): "Booker Prize-Winning Author of Hotel du Lac." It could have been that recommendation, plus the personally attractive title Leaving Home, plus the prim and proper Portrait of a Young Woman in a Red Dress (Imre Goth, 1931) as the jacket art that all combined to convince me to spend a little time with Ms. Brookner. Overall, I'm glad I did.

The book is deceivingly thin, the text quite dense. Leaving Home is about Emma Roberts, a young twenty-something struggling less to to "leave" than to truly define "home." She lives in London with her lymphatic, widowed mother, whom she describes as "a woman so inactive, her days reserved for reading and thinking. I soon learned not to disturb either process." Emma herself is contrained to live a reserved and thoughtful life, always desiring to break through that shell, but never fully motivated to do so. She does defy the wishes of her mother and unlikeable uncle by leaving London to study in France. Her major of choice? Classical garden design. She explains, "I was in search of a symmetry, a place of excellence that I should recognize and somehow make my own. I had no way of attaining this condition myself, but I felt that here was a concept that inspired a standard of behavior far removed from the tame and unambitious customs that were my true inheritance."

While in France, Emma meets Francoise, a bright and energetic friend to contrast her own subdued demeanor. Their friendship, on the surface, is an unlikely one. Francoise frequently regales Emma with stories of her male conquests and displays little in the way of genuine concern for Emma's own inability to make intimate connections. Francoise is more curious than anything about Emma's remote personality. I enjoyed the many interactions between these two women, particularly the way in which Emma identifies their different roles in the friendship. She understands that she is to be patient and longsuffering with Francoise, that she is "safe," uncomplicated, no threat to the exuberant French woman (who, understandably, does not get on well with other women). Francoise, for her part, is meant to supply the adventures and irrepresible joie de vive that Emma herself can't muster. Emma becomes more aware of herself through this friendship, and though there is ultimately no significant change to her outlook on life, she make some interesting observations. "I deduced that my inclinations were fraternal rather than romantic, that I preferred this kind of stasis to the rapid conquests practised by those young women who had been liberated into behaving like men, and of whom Francoise was the perhaps the ideal representative."

I think Brookner does a wonderful job of creating a place in this book, or two places really - London and Paris. I know nothing of either of these two cities, but Emma make plenty of interesting connections between the two. "[In Paris] there was an almost palpable air of renewed enthusiasm in the steps of the passersby, in greetings to neighbours, to cafe owners, to waiters who appeared on the doorsteps of restaurants to sniff the air and extend the city's hospitality to their regular patrons. It was impossible to contemplate leaving all this for London, which I perceived as apocalyptic terms, grey, lowering, morose...." Not all is dandy in Paris, however. I enjoyed two of Emma's many reflections on the difficulty of French living: "But this was somehow part of living in France, doing the infinitesimal wrong thing. It was part of the bararism of being English" ~and~ "It's an eternal apprenticeship, trying to be like the French."

It is difficult to say if Emma really ever succeeds in "leaving home." She spends much of the book back and forth between London and Paris, each populated by an untraditional (yet completely fitting with her reality) version of a lover. It seems that the moment she's in Paris, she longs for London, but the moment she's in London, all she can think of is Paris. She concedes, "I was now rootless in two places." I think the least satisfying part of the book is that she doesn't undergo the kind of change I was hoping to see. It's Francoise, ironically, who undergoes the greatest transformation. Emma more or less excuses her lack of epiphany by closing the book with "Not everyone is born to fulfil a heroic role." While I had to raise a brow at that, I do like how the thought continues, "The only realistic ambition is to live in the present. And sometimes, quite often in fact, this is more than enough to keep one busy."

The Seattle Times wrote of Brookner's novel, The Rules of Engagement: "Every page has a felicity of wording that makes you want to...underline passages that you don't want to forget." I found that to be true of Leaving Home as well. Since it's a library copy, I kept with my post-its, but even then they littered the pages. If I had been more diligent, I would have placed different colored sticky notes at all the words I didn't know, and then looked them up in a dictionary. But I'm a mom, and sometimes it's a miracle that I find time to read books like this at all. I would like to go back through this some day, though, for I am certain to improve my vocabulary by leaps and bounds if I looked up all the words that were new to me.

Hopefully as a benefit to you, here are just a few passages I did mark:

*"Our minds, our feelings can be altered by the most random circumstance, symmetry and order reduced to a dull pattern by the display of the alternative, after which hard work will be needed to put the original values back in place."

*(regarding the book she is writing): "He probably regarded my work as the equivalent of embroidering a sampler...."

*(in reference to Paris): "...I arrived, smelt the coffee and the cigarettes, sidestepped the water thrown in an arc to sluice the morning pavements, bought my newspaper, and appreciated once more a lack of obligations...."

*"It takes a kind of genius to save one's own life."

*"We were as one, perhaps, in the knowledge that the future had failed us, that life had not proceeded in the straight line on which we had once relied. Such knowledge is not diserable, and is moreover impossible to impart to those untouched by it."

I'm not placing this novel in the "Chewed and Digested" category, because as I said, I was disappointed by the ending. I understand that in real life it's true that people rarely change as much as we'd like them to, but in fiction I demand a little more than that. Still, this is a fabulous book and an interesting tour through a tale of one woman and two cities.

Someone said Ms. Brookner writes the same novel over and over. In a way she does, but her excellent writing always draws me into the story. Her main character is always such a solitary figure, and the "heroine" of this novel is no exception. This book is probably not as good as several of her others (my favorite is "Visitors"), but the ending is more satisfactory than she usually provides.

"We all have one book, and we write it over and over." This is another of Brookner's variations on the theme of the human inability to make or have a complete and satisfactory relationship , in love, and in life, with another. Emma Roberts is another of those lonely , cerebral characters whose hesitations and irresolutions so often are at the heart of Brookner's fictions.
I must admit that while enjoying a clever perception or keen insight here and there this work does not grip me deeply. It seems to me that I often read along waiting for some miraculous transformation some movement into a whole other mode of being, which never happens.
I know Brookner fans who find her to be the finest of all novelists. Perhaps this is too because they are obsessively concerned with relationships which never quite work out right.
This is not the best Brookner, but it is not the worst either.
It is a 'can't miss' item for her greatest fans, and 'another O.K. read' for those of us , less devoted.

I applaud Brookner for daring to write about the lives of quiet men and women, as they go about making their way in the world as best they can. These are not heroes and heroines whom the world will notice much, if at all. They're not especially good looking, and their clothes are dowdy. They often work in insurance offices, they're struggling grad students, or they're living off of small inheritances. Their sacrifices and small victories, and the lost opportunities that shape their lives are made breathtakingly beautiful by Brookner's spare, elegant style. There is never a superfluous word. And never any sentimentality, thank God.

I've analyzed her books thoroughly, and I'm still not sure how she manages to write with such tenderness and such toughness, both at the same time.

I don't agree that if you've read one, you've read them all; any more than I would agree with any critic who summed up Ernest Hemingway in that way.

But: I won't even pretend to be objective...I've been a fan of this author ever since I read Hotel Du Lac many years ago. Brava, Brookner!

I could barely stay awake during this novel. Yes, I know Anita Brookner is brilliant. Yes, I know she is a modern Jamesian, and I see and appreciate the parallels. Except that his books never put me to sleep.

The story of lifeless Emma and her attempts to GET a life after living in a stupefying existence with her equally lifeless mother in London was--well--stupefying. Emma goes to Paris, meets "real" and colorful people, but gravitates to Michael, a young man who is as much a cypher as she is.

There are some attempts to break out, but Emma is so repressed and so completely unable to take a big, long, breath, that I found myself in the same state while reading the book. Now that, of course, is the author's brilliance, along with the gorgeous use of words and the ability to create a mood within a mood.

But I didn't care about Emma, I was bored and aggravated with her and with the book, and while I could and did admire the incredible use of prose, that got boring too.

I gave the book a 3 becuase it is Brookner and because she is a master of her craft, but I cannot recommend this to anybody other than a hard-core Brookner aficionado.