By maybe a quarter or a third of the way through it, it still hasn't started moving. She's showing the inside of the mind of this narrator, Paul Sturgis, and how empty his life is, including his inner life. So when this woman, 20 years his junior, shows up in his life, she provides all this mental excitement, this drama, which he enjoys. And you immediately understand that she's a user, that she's spotted him as someone who is available to be used, who in fact may be fine with it, just so long as it provides him with the events that he's been lacking. So she seems to be setting him up for the big scam. And you want to yell at him, but he's so pathetic. Then, his ex-girlfriend comes into his life, and is also pathetic, but she still manages to emotionally abuse him. As does his cousin Helena, who is also pathetic. And, you know what. It doesn't get any better. Except when he finally hangs up on Vicky Gardner. What a climactic moment, eh? Strangers, by Anita Brookner, had the peculiar effect on me that other Brookner books have had: a sense that leaving the characters she presents in the lurch (not reading to the end) would be unfair to them because they are intelligent, if isolated, and perceptive, if undistinguished, and don't have that many good friends in the narrative, either. So they need readers, and I plowed ahead for their sake, only mildly curious about how Brookner was going to sustain a tale going nowhere, thought by thought, worry by worry.The core of this story is that Paul Sturgis was an only child who never married but had modest success as a London banker and now, in retirement, doesn't know what to do with himself. He loses his last relative, Helena, who never meant much to him, and he is picked up, to a certain extent, by a younger woman, and he re-encounters an old lover, Sarah, who chucked him because he was too nice. And that's sort of it until the very end of the book when he realizes, in a Jamesian moment (or actually two such moments) that if he doesn't get out of London, he'll be the living dead for longer than he cares to ponder.The first Jamesian moment occurs when he's tending to his haggard old lover's twisted ankle: "His hand remained on her ankle, in a gesture of appeasement. Instinct told him to breathe in a less compromised air, to get out, to walk as he was accustomed to walking, as if nothing could ever stop him. To stay any longer in this red room was to accept confinement, not merely to sympathize, but worse, to empathize, to mimic this fallen condition."The second Jamesian moment occurs on the last page, so I won't quote it.The point is that Paul Sturgis finally realizes, in his seventy-fourth year, that he's never really made his own decisions or known what to do with freedom, always settled for reason when disturbed by irrational instinct, and had better get away from Sarah, the lover who chucked him long ago, at least a little bit. Paris might do it…and if not Paris, then somewhere sunnier further south.Henry James is referenced in this novel once or twice, likewise Proust, but the real influence, Philip Larkin, gets the most direct attention. Brookner writes: "Home, as Philip Larkin memorably observed, is so sad."Is it? Maybe in this book.Larkin, who had the personality of a prune or something more sour (let's also consider a lemon), occupies a fairly lofty place in 20th century British poetry that consistently surprises me, but I wasn't at all surprised to see him pop up toward the end of this gloomy novel. Gloominess, low expectations, emotional constipation, dreariness, the discomforts of alienation…these were Larkin's trademarks. Same thing with Brookner. Sometimes we're all in that kind of low mood, however, and that's ultimately Brookner's appeal. She matches up well with the depths of winter, rainy days, and the solitude of modern existence.For more of my comments on contemporary writing, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).
What do You think about Strangers. Anita Brookner (2009)?
A book that leaves you with a cold, lonely feeling. As it stimulates thought, it warrants 3 stars.
—celeneybean
Classic Brookner: self-absorbed characters leading sad lives, examined in beautiful, clear prose.
—superoxc
If stranded in an island, I'd like to be stranded with any Anita Brookner book.
—peyton
