"A Start in Life" by Anita Brookner

This was Brookner's debut novel, published in 1981 when she was 53.

Ruth is the daughter of an indolent shopkeeper and an actress mother. She is cursed by believing herself too plain to be attractive to men, which perhaps leads her to attempt the most unsuitable men. Her efforts to escape her stupefying home lead her to a year studying in Paris (Balzac, who becomes her life's work; the author quotes bits of Eugenie Grandet in the original French). Cinderella shall go the ball? Not necessarily.

Brookner has also written the Booker-prize-winning Hotel du Lac (about a very similar subject, an ageing romantic novelist seeking love), and Family and Friends (another mournful old lady looking back).

Brookner's prose is always elegant though sometimes old-fashioned: "She made the gesture all betrothed women make, holding up her hand in front of her, trying to see the ring as a part of it that she would soon take for granted." (C 18) Most people nowadays would say 'engaged' rather than 'betrothed'. In many ways the entire book is old-fashioned and harks back to the Victorian novelists that the protagonist adores: thus Ruth's parents can afford a full-time live-in housekeeper in their London house, even when they have both finished working, and Ruth herself has a legacy which provides her with independent means to some extent.

Brookner uses a multi-perspective point of view ('head-hopping' is something first novelists are often warned against); this is a style she also employs in Family and Friends. Thus, although the frame narrative is that of Ruth, the ageing lecturer in Literature, looking back at her life, parts of the story are told through the eyes of George, her father, Mrs Cutler, the home help (and the only person who engineers a happy ending), and even Molly, a bit part with whom Ruth's parents stay on a holiday to Brighton.

Brookner also allows the authorial voice to intrude and make comments:

• "Ruth woke at her habitual early hour of six and wondered how she was going to fill the day. With anticipation naturally. This is how most women in love fill their day. Frequently the event anticipated turns out to be quite dull compared with the mood that preceded it." (C 6)
• "Like most young people, Roddy hated hypocrites, and did not allow for the fact that he was growing into one himself." (C 19)
• "In the country of the old and sick there are environmental hazards. Cautious days. Early nights. A silent, ageing life in which the anxiety of the invalid overrides the vitality of the untouched." (C 21)

Some wonderful moments:

• "Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." (C 1)
• "Her appearance and character were exactly half-way between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." (C 1)
• "Pieces of furniture of incredible magnitude in dark woods which looked as though they had absorbed the blood of horses." (C 2)
• "The grandmother knew, and bore the knowledge grimly, that her son was a lightweight and her daughter-in-law a lighter weight still, that each needed the protection of the other, that neither had grown up or would be able to grow old, and that their ardent and facile love-play would damage the child." (C 2)
• "She has the soul of an air hostess." (C 4)
• "Sometimes she kept her make-up on all night in order not to give herself a shock the following morning." (C 10)
• "George knew that he no longer loved his wife. He felt ... extremely sorry for her. As a natural corollary, he felt extremely sorry for himself." (C 10)
• "We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care." (C 10)
• "Life had not been too harsh. The sea would still be there at the end. She was nearly ready. But Helen, she saw, would be taken unawares." (C 10)
• "There are marriage bureaux, of course. ... Why don't you sign on or fill in the form or whatever you have to do, and then you can ask them back here, whoever they are. If anyone turns up." (C 11)
• "She still could not believe that anyone had consigned her to this place when she had committed no crime." (C 12)
• "She studied the couple closely, as if they were an unknown species. They were, in fact, an unknown species. They were happy." (C 12)
• "She perceived that most tales of morality were wrong, that even Charles Dickens was wrong, and that the world is not won by virtue." (C 12)
• "'Is it all a game then?' she asked. 'Only if you win,' was her reply. 'If you lose, it's far more serious'." (C 12)
• "They were right when they said how sharper than a servant's tooth is man's ingratitude." (C 15)
• "An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage." (C 16)
• "Ruth still believed that adults adhered to a superior standard of behaviour." (C 20)

Elegant, profoundly sad, and rather old-fashioned. April 2020; 176 pages