From Publishers Weekly
To read Brookner is to be reminded of fiction's potential to stun, with full, complex characters in a richly imagined world, as she draws on her insights into human nature to explore the strained yet enduring friendship of two women of "the last virginal generation." Born in 1948 and friends from childhood, the open, eager-to-please Betsy and the cooler, analytical Elizabeth appear to have little in common. But they share many things, including stubbornness, strength and, dangerously, the same married lover. Seen through the eyes of 50-something Elizabeth, the novel chronicles the often devastating choices the two women make as they age; as such, it is more a book of thought than action. The reclusive Elizabeth, conscious of the mysterious "virtue attached to being a witness," dissects the minutest of human interactions, imposing elaborate rules of self-governance with which she often does battle. Her gaze is ruthless but brilliantly illuminating. "I saw our childlessness as an indictment, a reproach to what had been our folly," Elizabeth observes of herself and Betsy. "We had seen ourselves always as lovers, whereas sensible persons, or perhaps those with greater understanding of the world, make their peace with existing circumstances.... we had chosen, she and I, to stay within the limits of this exalted and fragile condition." Within those limits, in Brookner's skilled hands, vast worlds of human possibility exist.
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Two London girls born in 1948 and both named Elizabeth start school on the same day. One is asked to choose an alternative, and she opts for Betsy, a bid for cheerfulness in light of her dim orphan life. Elizabeth appears to be far better off, but her seemingly glamorous parents' marriage is wretchedly unhappy. Lacking in imagination and fire, Elizabeth marries Digby, a dull man 27 years her senior. Betsy goes to Paris, falls catastrophically in love, and returns to London, where Elizabeth has embarked on a chilly affair. Digby dies; Betsy meets Elizabeth's selfish lover at the wake; the women's guarded friendship becomes even more strained; and, as time drains away, their lives become studies in purposelessness. Each year Brookner presents a morbidly fascinating inquiry into the nature of stoicism and "circumstances of bleak rectitude" as though issuing an annual report on the psychology of helplessly solitary and obscenely idle individuals. Shrewd and idiosyncratic, these tense interior dramas offer piquant pleasures thanks to Brookner's mordant wit, gorgeous language, and acute understanding of the axis between pride and shame, loneliness and misanthropy, integrity and cruelty. She also offers sterling insights into the differences between men and women and the peculiar voluptuousness of obsessive self-regard.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
