Customer Reviews

Visitors: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the reclusive and sensitive Mrs. May, Anita Brookner has created a character of utterly memorable proportions. Though no one is allowed behind the high walls of her inner world, the reader is invited to spend a week there: the impressions of this experience stick. Brookner's prose is flat but fertile, a golden plain that rustles in the breeze and is ripe for harvest. And other characters frequent these pages: the young as viewed from the treetops of age; the old and their shifting grasp on life; the dead exhumed and examined in the light. And all cry out to be heard, some with a genteel wave of the hand, others with self-satisified, irritated shouts. To know Mrs. May, one must begin to think the way she does, and perhaps this is the real brilliance of this novel: one is given a roadmap to her mind and urged to use it. It is difficult to believe that the "visitors" themselves could be as oafish as they are; this novel is also a meditation on the smiling thoughtlessness of youth. Age, too, must undergo rigorous cross-examination in the courtroom of this book, and the testimony given makes fascinating reading. Brookner is so smooth, so pleasant to imbibe, that one forgets she is a complex and sophisticated drink. Don't let the readability of "Visitors" fool you; this novel is fun, but hardly kidstuff.

In an age when most novels deal with issues in the heavy handed rhetoric of psychotherapy, it is a joy to see Brookner filter her observations with such subtelty and taste. And when most editors mandate that their authors "dramatize" every scene with clunky dialogue (as if we were children and could not get the message any other way!), I found it a meditative pleasure to read a novel so deeply steeped in a character's inner life. Yet, when dialogue appears, it is flawless.

Brookner is a supremely subtle writer. For example, many of Thea's differences with her husband's cousins are due to the fact that she is a gentile who married into a close-knit family of Jews. Yet, the word "Jew" never apears once. She manages to handle the issue delicately, without offending anyone, grinding an axe or drawing too much attention it.

It was an enlightening change to see life through the eyes of a seventy-year old, and unlike some of Brookner's novels, this book had a gently upbeat ending.

An editor of mine once said to me that he didn't think a wholelot happened in an Anita Brookner novel. "It's like somebody takes a painting off the wall and contemplates the patch of wallpaper that hasn't faded. That's the book."

He was right--and he was very wrong.

Lives in Brookner's novels almost always follow the same arc as that wallpaper--from bright possibility to faded reality, and her characters are struck by the contrast of hopeful past and dim present. That is, the characters she most sympathizes with. Because in Brookner's world, there are the quiet, compliant, resigned types (who sometimes long to be bolder), and then there are brash heedless people who like FitzGerald's Daisy and Tom Buchanan smash things and people because they don't care what others think.

The painful and sometimes humiliating interaction of these two types is the source of the drama. Brookner's often compared to Henry James, and like James, she posits that adventures of consciousness, travels of the mind and heart, are as strange and threatening as any other trips we might make.

Brookner's newest novel, her seventeenth, is a gloriously moving example of her insight into this paradox, written as always in witty and crystalline prose, and with her usual poetic psychological precision.

Dorothea May grew up very quietly in a London suburb, and it shaped her values: "One ate plain food, was careful not to give offence, and stayed at home until one married." This outwardly sedate spinster's life--in which trips to Europe were as uneventful as trips to the library--was interrupted by an accidental meeting that lead to a happy fifteen-year marriage. But when her husband Henry died, Dorothea slipped back into the silence and virtual isolation she had been so accustomed to. While she had dearly loved her husband, when she at last got rid of his things, she "felt a sort of elation on realizing that in the future she would not be disturbed."

Well-off at seventy, in reasonably good health, but fighting recognition of her body's growing frailty, she's also profoundly aware of "approaching the end of life, and that silence was appropriate." Brookner captures the sustaining rituals of Dorothea's narrowed life with heartbreaking and at times comic accuracy. While her own family is gone, she does have rich in-laws left, and doesn't really mind providing them with a conversational "diversion" due to her perceived oddness.

These same in-laws--careful to phone her every week to check on her health, but never coming much closer--disrupt the reverie-filled life she's sunken into. Her sister-in-law's granddaughter has decided to come back to London from Massachusetts to get married, and Dorothea is pressured to offer her hospitality to the best man. The idea of a stranger in her home is appalling, but Dorothea can't say no to this surprising request.

Until now, she has been "moving through her shadowy rooms undisturbed, as though she were her own ghost." But the presence of a houseguest who is young and somewhat opaque to her, along with the oncoming wedding and the immersion in the present, is enough to change her life. That change is Jamesian: Dorothea comes to see her childhood, her parents, her marriage, her one brief affair in a completely new light. She emerges radiant with understanding, and can heroically face growing old: "the country without maps." It's an almost breathtaking series of insights and discoveries, and Visitors is that rare book: a literary page-turner.

Brookner's great gifts as a novelist are on lavish display in Visitors. Few authors can communicate as deftly and subtly as she can the shocking passage of time, or the baffling way friends can drift apart, and the quiet lies and evasions of family life. What's most amazing is that the quality of her work has been so consistently high year after year. If you haven't read any of her novels, Visitors is a wonderful introduction to one of our best and most consistently enjoyable contemporary novelists.

Lev Raphael, author of LITTLE MISS EVIL, 4th in the Nick Hoffman series...

This is my first experience of Anita Brookner and it won't be my last! Her writing is exquisitely beautiful and compelling, revealing emotional states with precision and depth. What could easily have been a totally depressing story, in Brookner's hands, is almost transcendent. This is a truly wonderful book. I couldn't put it down.

While "Visitors" doesn't rank with the incomparable "Hotel du Lac", it still reverberates with Brookner's wonderfully careful prose and scrupulously examined characters.

Little occurs in the way of plot. In the world of Dorothea May and her husband's cousins, the carefully measured world of sheltered people over the age of seventy, the simplest change in their lives is the stuff of high drama. When Cousin Kitty asks Dorothea to take in the friend of her American granddaughter for a week, Dorothea is severely shaken. The simple act of having a border, and an unobtrusive one at that, is enough to make Dorothea examine her past and current life and decide that some changes are in order.

And yet the changes are infintesimal, small enough to be laughable in less capable hands. But, as usual, Brookner handles them masterfully. This novel contains mostly interior reflection and sometimes seems repetitive, even contradictory And yes, Brookner fans will recognize another aging, lonely, unfulfilled character. But her words never fail her and Brookner readers will not be disappointed.

Anita Brookner is a wonderful writer.I've read most of her lovely novels. She lets a reader see the inner lives of her characters. I loved the way Mrs. Mays longed to be someone different (an old, outrageous woman in a black dress) but realized she had to stay as what she was. Her boarder(not border as in another review) actually did little to change the direction of Dorothea's life. I could feel how Dorothea was affected by another presence in the home she had lived in with only the memory of her late husband.

Not one of the well-drawn characters was really able to turn around their lives. "All that was left was for them to find some middle way, between acceptance and defeat." Exactly.

Half way through my first Brookner novel. As a 70 year old woman myself I at times see myself in Thea, but not yet as withdrawn from life as she is, but I know the feeling of having one's solitude invaded. One query: The painting on the cover is evocative, but the painting is identified as "The Compass and the Flask." I can make out the flask but am I missing something about the compass?

Dorothea May is a 70-year old widow living in an Edwardian mansion block in London. She enjoys living alone and her social life is limited to her former husband's cousins Kitty and Molly. She enjoys silence because she knows that the end of her life is approaching. She is shy of affectionate gestures and enjoys fiction and radio more than the company of people because no response is called for.
She often recalls how she met her husband Henry and she doesn't seek joy anymore, settling instead for reasonable satisfaction. Her girlhood was innocent of sexual involvement, like that of a Victorian maiden.
One day Kitty announces that her granddaughter Ann is to come to London to marry David. They're both coming with a friend, Steve Best, and it is Kitty's whish that Mrs May puts Steve up in her flat for a week. At first Mrs May refuses but then. The ensuing few days she spends with her lodger will change Mr May's life considerably.
In this remarkable novel, the author shows that if the gregarious fear loneliness, to the solitary the gregarious pose a much greater threat. She also shows that a young man's objections to the old are likely to be predominantly physical as well as moral.

This is the first Anita Brookner book I have read, and even though I was entranced by the story line, I found the sentence structure long and rambling. Ms. Brookner weaves her thoughts with a difficult warp. Her repetitive return to previously covered subjects left me often wondering if something had changed...didn't I read about this before. Sometimes I felt it was too rambling and ended up skipping whole paragraphs just to avoid the trackless thoughts. Even though she has won prior awards, Ms. Brookner might want to think about getting a new editor.

This was a huge disappointment after Hotel du Lac. Though I sympathized w/ Thea, I couldn't relate to any of the other characters. Thanks, but no thanks - I'll pass on all the other Brookner "novels."