Lost in Widowhood’s Vast Spaces

Never mind the tartan headlines of the tabloids, the bare breasts of the Sun, the Oprahfiliac confessions of the post-Di royals and poet laureate Ted Hughes. England is still a country of vast silences, where Elizabeth is the monarch, Harold Pinter is the patron saint and all the important stuff is buried beneath a sea of tranquillity and daffodils.

English to the core, Anita Brookner’s 17th novel, “Visitors,” has the bland and motionless surface of a shepherd’s pie. Dorothea’s marriage to Henry May, at age 39, did not lead her into the Jane Austenish heaven of her girlhood dreams, but into an English garden of noble gentility. Childless, she adopted Henry and his quiet needs: the weekly trip to visit his sister, the occasional dinner with his cousins Kitty Levinson and Molly Goodman and their husbands up in Hampstead. It was a relationship characterized by silence. “She said little, as did he, words, they both knew, would only divide them.”

As the novel opens, Henry has been dead for 15 years. Thea has settled uncomplainingly into the deadly life of the elderly and the forgotten. The tedium of the day is punctuated only by morning tea on a shared slab of patio and lunch at the local Italian restaurant. Once a week, she receives a phone call from Kitty or Molly.

Then one Sunday, the phone rings a second time. Kitty’s granddaughter Ann, the daughter of Kitty’s estranged son, is returning from America to London with her fiance, David, and wants to be married in Kitty’s house. A friend of David’s, named Steve, will be accompanying them and will require lodging.

It’s a promising setup: the young man in the guest room. Maybe there really is an Anne Elliot or Elizabeth Bennet hidden somewhere within Thea’s aging bosom just waiting to be watered by the Mr. D’Arcy that this Steve might be. Suffice it to say that the dynamics never rise above a mezzo-piano.

What this means is that the reader, in desperation as much as anything else, tries to create a story, a little bit of drama, out of the unspoken. Is the gap that divides Thea from her late husband’s family one of religion and culture? Thea’s maiden name was Jackson, a stout, Anglican name. Henry May was born a Meyer, his cousins surnamed Levinson, Goodman and Goldmark. Dorothea lives in the center of London, the cousins in Hampstead. “Although exile was distant by two generations, the family had always seemed in need of a security that was not quite within its grasp. . . . [T]hey were preternaturally alert to the threat of otherness. And with her thin frame and her meek but decided presence she had represented a majority to which they could never belong.”

The word “Jew” appears nowhere in the book, yet it seems to be the key to break the code of “Visitors” out of its tepid surface--the Jewish suburb of Hampstead; Meyer and Levinson versus Jackson; the exiles versus the native. But is it fair to say that Brookner has written a very subtle book about the nature of loneliness and exile, with Judaism and Christianity fighting in the pagan coliseum that is London in the ‘90s? The pieces are all there.

The very weightlessness of Brookner’s characters allows the reader space to maneuver, a spare room in the author’s mind to decorate with substance and color.

Making the reader work is not a bad thing. Yet the work in “Visitors” is very different from the mental exercise of juggling the dense menace of threat and silence that a Pinter play requires. It’s much closer to the experience of riding a stationary bicycle: not much of a sweat, and when you get off, you realize you’ve gotten nowhere.