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"In her reply she pulled off her nightdress, in a way that shocked me. Yet she did not seem to be afflicted with any particular shyness, having evidently forgotten she was an ageing woman face-to-face with someone who was still intact... For a terrible moment I thought she might expect me to wash her."
Anita Brookner's newest novel, THE BAY OF ANGELS, stands in sharp relief to the current rash of chick lit fiction (CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC, JEMIMA J, and the archetypal chubby girl emerges from chrysalis as fabulous "It" girl phenomenon yarn BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY) pouring out of the U. K. Reading Brookner, markedly older in years and experience, and her staid and chilly reserve is a welcome cool intermezzo to cleanse the palate after confections whose charm is both cloying and fleeting. There are no guilty pleasures in THE BAY OF ANGELS, or even pleasure for that matter.
Zoe Cunningham grows up fatherless in reduced circumstances in London with a husk of a mother, who hides a debilitating medical condition behind a life of passivity. Brookner very brusquely lays down her conceit of life as a fairy tale flawed at its very core. Unlike some fairy tales where the young heroine's unknown origins are later revealed to be storied and impressive, Zoe's father is known to her only as a dim photo of a young undergraduate who later worked as a librarian. The Cunningham womenfolk only barely manage to attract a white knight, albeit with feet of clay and a bank account less flush than they had hoped for or been led to expect. He is neither handsome nor young.
An older Jewish businessman, Simon brings fleeting comfort to their lives, only to have his meager flashiness bring their shabby gentility to better light. He removes Zoe's mother to his deceased first wife's house in Nice, thereby freeing, in so far as Zoe is capable of freedom, his new stepdaughter to fall into a horribly uninteresting love affair with an unimaginative lout. The point of so-called "romantic" entanglements in Brookner's writing seems to be to address practical deficits in housing and living allowances. When Simon succumbs unspectacularly to a fall, Zoe's mother has a breakdown and drags his lifeless form into bed with her. Unsurprisingly, Brookner has the doctor deliver the line that Simon's death is clear in French, "'Il est condamne, Madame...Voyez-vous, les sphincters se relachent.'"
There are times when Brookner's learned and modulated tones give the reader a craving for more direct speech. Her crystalline diction and posing of affected rhetorical questions can leave the impression that you are in the presence of a grande dame recalling better times and not a youthful narrator, albeit one drained of id or impetus towards happiness. Brookner does not simper or indulge in thoughtless optimism; Zoe asks herself while observing her mother's recovery from her sleep cure in Nice whether or not her mother would be better off dead:
"I even wondered whether there were any way of making my fears --- or were they wishes? --- known to those in charge, and whether or not they would regard me as an unnatural daughter, or simply as one who recognized the necessity of solutions."
Her mother incapacitated, Zoe must sort through the rather modest effects left to her mother and learns of various unpleasantries in the process. The whole driving force in this drama is that of fate and the necessity of stoically going through the motions, if only to save face.
Zoe's mother conveniently expires quietly, and her daughter manages to achieve a stilted quasi intimacy with her mother's former doctor. Brookner's follow up to her Booker Prize winning book, HOTEL DU LAC, is neither sexy, fun nor flirty but it is worth reading.
--- Reviewed by Patricia Howard
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