Waiting Game : A PRIVATE VIEW, <i> By Anita Brookner (Random House: $23; 272 pp.)</i>

Anita Brookner, whose “Hotel Du Lac” was awarded England’s Booker Prize, is justly praised for her restraint and insight, and once more she demonstrates them in her 14th book, which begins in the mind of a man, George Bland, whom we have met before. Sensitive, depressed, wealthy, in flight from his nightmares and in search of something about which to dream, he pitches up in Europe. He is 65, and his dearest friend, Michael Putnam, not his lover but his soul’s truest mate, has died. Brookner writes that in Nice, he “had sought a restorative, conventional enough.”

As an admirer of her work, I cannot imagine the author hurling down a gauntlet, but I can envision her placing it with some firmness before the reader and herself. I can see her daring herself and the reader by offering a “conventional enough” situation that she must then make her own. No serious writer wants to employ conventions without altering them to suit her or his sense of structure and language, and no serious reader wants to read a repetition of conventional form that isn’t, somehow, a pushing forward of the form’s capabilities. Here, Brookner reaches into literature and social pattern to retrieve the man she must make more than bland to us, the quiet English searcher who is unaware of what he seeks, but whose life is incomplete for him and not very meaningful for us until he finds a heightening of emotion and thought that yields, to him and to us, his truest self.

Think of Graham Greene’s unhappy wanderers, or Henry James’ stifled travelers. One of them, John Marcher, who is the protagonist of the 1903 novella “The Beast in the Jungle,” is assisted by May Bartram to wait for the overwhelming emotion, the crucial and self-defining moment, of his life. We know that it has already appeared--as May herself; Marcher is a slow learner, and May has died by the time his culminating realization is offered by James as this:

“The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess. . . .”

Marcher then scorns “the chill of his egotism and the light of her use,” and falls either swooning or dead on her tomb.

It is such a situation, “conventional enough,” that Brookner establishes early in her novel. Bland and Putnam were to take a long, slow journey through the Far East but were stopped by Putnam’s sudden illness and death, and Bland realizes that “They had waited too long.” We begin to see Bland’s life--a good if quotidian career as head of personnel in a large firm, a decent rise from a sad, impoverished childhood to financial comfort in pleasant London surroundings--as defined, like Marcher’s, by waiting. The question of the novel is whether in all matters Bland will have waited “for too long.” The question for the writer (and her readers) is whether “A Private View” will be a rehearsal of novelistic convention about that wait, or something new and Brookner’s own.

The clean, lucid prose is surely her own. The quiet, frustrated characters belong to her and to the convention she challenges: Bland, who is bland; Katy Gibbs, a 35-ish American adventurer of sorts, who talks her way into using a temporarily vacant flat near Bland’s and who looms as the jump-start his sluggish heart has long required; Louise, George’s first real love whom he would not marry, who has been married and widowed and with whom he is in constant, comfortable, but curiously unprofitable-feeling touch.

Katy Gibbs, a softly attractive monster of amalgamation--she wishes to start a business based on “Shiatsu, Vibrasound, Tantric Massage, Reflexology, Chakra, Crystal Therapy, Essential Oils . . . Flower Remedies, Colour Counselling”--is an English cartoon about America’s excesses. She is impossible for a reader to like, but perhaps this caricature serves to emphasize how desperate George is for an encounter. He sees her as a “gleaming mouth closing on a morsel of nourishment, her scarlet fingertips guiding it steadily towards extinction.” She is a textbook representation of appetite, of George’s equation of sex with death, and of his hungers for and disgust with them.

Katy is either dressed in black as Sex-and-Death, or perceived in tones of heat to remind us of George’s slumbering passions. She is a soap-opera serpent and is rescued from ridiculousness by Brookner’s allegiance to George’s consciousness and by her strong use of small details through which she achieves a kind of versimilitude. George, especially in his encounters with Katy, perceives and expresses himself and his surroundings in terms of words I can borrow from the James quotations above: twilight, cold, pale and chill. They well represent the world of her characters that Brookner typically suggests--as, here, we are shown a tree outside George’s flat, which “ . . . somehow flourished on the edge of the pavement and was a glory of blossom in the spring. Now it could boast only a dozen or so tired leaves, all hanging down lifeless and waiting for the next wind to plaster them to the kerb which even now was darkening under a light sprinkling of rain.”

Sharing this sad world is Louise, whom Brookner relentlessly characterizes as comfortable but unexciting--the May Bartram of this long wait. Here, about 40 years after they loved and could have married, while they are still together as a kind of couple, visiting and calling often and regularly, Brookner has George summarize: “It was because Louise would have fitted in so well with the traditional idea of a wife that he had perversely put a curb on marrying her.” This irony is made clumsy by Brookner’s repetition of such truths about Louise, who is shown in retrospect as an assemblage of kindness and placidity, and only infrequently as a person of flesh in dramatic interactions. She is the grandmother-made-of-straw--a setup, in other words, for the rhetorical use Brookner makes of her in establishing, rather mechanically, George’s predicament. We understand that Louise was right for him and still is; we understand that he doesn’t realize it; we watch him betray himself by pitching woo at the cold, manipulative American, and we wait to see if he will become John Marcher, face down on Louise’s tomb.

Most encounters here are brief, most dialogue is minimal; emotional transactions take place more in Bland’s mind than in the chilly London air. If Bland has a feeling that he cannot cope with (and the novel is essentially about them) he then either falls into an uncomfortable sleep or becomes disgusted with food. A longing for sex, which here may be a surrogate for the spice of purpose in a bland existence, is usually followed by a perception of, say, the “cruel and all too brief winter sun.”

I am saying that the Jamesian mold constricts Brookner and that her own noteworthy convention suppresses both Bland’s escape from his past and his author’s escape from repeating her (and our) literary past. Bland is moved from prearranged place to prearranged place, from repetition of literary point to repetition of point. We watch him wait, and we watch him replace Katy with--it is hardly a surprise, given the number of reiterations about her--Louise. He settles for second best, and it is, maybe still unbeknown to him, first choice.

The reader finishes this novel with admiration for the skill with which the literary points are connected. But connecting dots, no matter the intelligence with which they are arranged, removes suspense and exploration from the writing and from the reading. In the end, “It was like a detective story, or a novel by Henry James,” George thinks, as Brookner perhaps reminds herself of her challenge to herself, even as she repeats both herself and the literary convention.

Brookner writes well here. I think she cannot write poorly. But what she does is cover the same gray, chilled terrain she has capably patrolled for so long and above which the reader and, I would suggest, the writer, had hoped she would soar.