Hotel du Lac (Anita Brookner)

30 Jul, 2024

This post is part of Commonplace Classics, wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love.

Anita Brookner was an English art historian who began publishing fiction in her fifties; Hotel du Lac, her fourth novel, won the 1984 Booker Prize. For all Brookner's success and remarkable productivity - she published twenty-four novels before her death in 2016 - a pall hung over her work: "the prevailing myth held that Brookner wrote conservative, middlebrow stories about dull and repressed women", the sort of thing Saul Bellow had in mind when he dismissed Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont as "an elegant tinkling teacup novel of the kind that you Brits do very well, but it's not serious stuff." Please check off numbers two, four and five on your How to Suppress Women's Writing scorecard.

These days, there has been a revival of interest in Brookner's work. Backlisted's Andy Miller has been an advocate, as have various bloggers. Penguin has begun republishing their Brookner range with truly terrible new covers. The academy is getting on board, with at least one Brookner symposium having taken place since her death. I myself have read several of her novels, and I'm writing about one here, starting any moment now. Will future historians epitomise the 2020s as "The Brookner Boom"? It's too soon to tell, but certainly nothing else of importance has happened this decade, nor will it.

Hotel du Lac is set on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Edith Hope - "a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name" - has taken refuge from (we infer) a minor scandal back in London. The eponymous hotel is a faded beauty, a "gynaeceum" (as Edith acidly notes) populated by by the shunned wives and extravagant widows of successful men. It's the kind of genteel, tea-centric place that would cause Saul Bellow to expel steam from his ears and dive headfirst into the lake. One assumes. Incidentally, are there any novels about continental Europeans holidaying in shabby off-season British hotels, or is the traffic entirely one way?

We don't know why Edith has been packed off to her "tiny exile" in Switzerland, but we do know she has been having an affair with David, a married man. Edith is in love with David, while David appears to be using Edith as a no-strings distraction from the pressures of career and family life. Essentially, she's his regular booty call. (Please now imagine Anita Brookner saying the words "booty call".) This being a hotel novel, the cast includes a number of colourful supporting players, including the narcissistic Mrs Pusey, her large adult daughter Jennifer, and "languid and luxurious" gossip Monica. Then there is the superficially charming Mr Neville, an advocate for the selfish pursuit of pleasure who (selfishly, in pursuit of pleasure) tries to establish himself as a Nietzschean devil on Edith's shoulder.

I must confess that it took me a while to get into Hotel du Lac. This was mostly, if not entirely, my own fault, as I was trying to read it while in a distracted, fidgety state - hardly the condition in which to appreciate Brookner's precise, measured prose. But there was something else: an increasing worry that Hotel du Lac wasn't up to the standard of the other Brookner novels I have read; that beneath the elegant surface there wasn't much going on.

I ought to have known that these worries would prove groundless. They don't give the Booker Prize to novels of little substance¹! More to the point, I knew from experience that Brookner's novels tend to begin slowly, carefully, such that the reader (this reader, anyway) is apt to feel resistance right up to the point where it all snaps into focus and you find yourself turning the pages with alacrity. Sure enough, that's what happened with Hotel du Lac: I went from "hmm" to "huh!" in the space of about ten pages.

This shift in perception upends the reader's expectations, and prompts a reevaluation of the book to that point. To give an example, Hotel du Lac's close third-person narration is interspersed with letters from Edith to her lover, David. The letters are witty, perceptive, novelistic, written in a voice not a million miles removed from that of the third-person narrator, and therefore seemingly redundant. But when we discover what is really going on with Edith, the letters appear in a new light, and not only to the reader: Edith begins to meditate on the "function" of her letters, her role in David's life as (more or less) a deviser of light entertainment. She even checks herself when writing a letter that "somehow accumulated elements of introspection, of criticism, even of bitterness" - elements, that is, of her real emotions. What seemed a superfluous and even hackneyed device turns out to be integral to the development of Edith as a character, and to the structure of the novel.

Given how tightly Brookner controls her plot, it's difficult to write about what happens in Hotel du Lac without giving the whole thing away. Not that there's a twist or anything particularly dramatic, but Brookner's working out of Edith's story is best encountered unspoiled. I will say that I think Brookner is especially good at ending her books, and this is no exception: the story lands gracefully on the final sentence, leaving the reader with that rare and lovely sense of both closure and possibility.

I can understand why people might be put off reading Anita Brookner's novels. It's true that they take place in a constrained, conservative milieu; they are not diverse in any modern sense of the word; they are not even particularly feminist, despite focusing largely on women attempting to make their own way in the world. They can feel old-fashioned, or even strangely out of time - Hotel du Lac often feels like an older book than it is. Yet Brookner is an incredibly rewarding writer: a sardonic observer of human nature; a clear-eyed delineator of interpersonal power dynamics and self-delusion; and a natural storyteller, whose superficially eventless novels chart profound psychological changes. Serious stuff indeed.

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Next up on Commonplace Classics, Graham Greene's 1955 novel of love and war and hopefully not too much racism, The Quiet American.

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