Vaporous

Visitors

Anita Brookner

With that title, and a cover like the one my paperback edition has, it ought to be a ghost story. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be one; the lead character might as well be a ghost, anyway, for all the energy and gumption she shows. 

This is a good novel? Anita Brookner is the modern Jane Austen?

So: widowed lady, seventy or thereabouts, has a houseguest thrust upon her by her rich in-laws. He’s to be the best man at their granddaughter’s wedding. The bride’s father is the family black sheep, largely out of the picture. Her intended is some kind of evangelical Christian pastor, though everyone else in the story appears to be Jewish. The pair of them are the typical uncouth young idiots who are often introduced to spice up a story about boring, rich old people by way of humorous contrast, like the music student and his wife in The Lyre of Orpheus or the rude young hippie couple at a dinner party in Earthly Powers. These two are not nearly as deftly drawn as either of those couples, but they’re being set up for the same kind of comical humiliation as far as I can see. The best man is just a cipher, his only purpose being to cause Boring Old Dear to look back upon, and rue, all the dissatisfactions of her largely colourless life.

Meanwhile there are family quarrels and fits of the vapours, but they’re all shown us through the filtering eyes of our widowed protagonist, whose feelings and reactions are barely animate. There are, of course, a few ‘action scenes’ (parlour set-pieces, really) but most of the novel consists of her inner ruminations.

I don’t know if I’m going to finish this. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and wondering why I’m wasting my time on it when there are so many books I would enjoy reading better. 

Poor Jane Austen. There’s more wit and energy in one of her paragraphs than in this whole novel. A much more appropriate comparison would be Virginia Woolf – whom, needless to say, I thoroughly detest.