A Romance With the Dark Tinge of Reality

FALLING SLOWLY by Anita Brookner; Random House $24, 228 pages

Twelve years ago, when Anita Brookner was six novels into an oeuvre that “Falling Slowly,” her new book, now exactly triples in size, she reflected on the nature of the romantic novel in her Paris Review interview.

“The true romantic novel,” she said, “is about delayed happiness, and the pilgrimage you go through to get that imagined happiness. In the genuine romantic novel there is confrontation with truth.”

In “Falling Slowly,” which is in some ways her response to, and inimitable version of, a romantic novel, Brookner begins by exploring the differences between the romantic and the realist in two sisters, Beatrice and Miriam Sharpe. Beatrice, an accompanist, possesses an “unashamed romanticism.”

“I want love--I make no apology for that,” she tells Miriam. “I want the real thing.” Miriam, who translates novels from French into English and is described by another character as “Sharpe by name and sharp by nature,” has by contrast “scaled down her expectations in the name of realism.” “I’m reconciled,” she insists. “I know that one man couldn’t give me everything I want.”

The pilgrimage Brookner designs for Beatrice and Miriam naturally does not unfold quite as this early adumbration of their different positions suggests. Beatrice, the unabashed romantic, submits to passionless courtships by elderly exiles, waits for a bouleversement that never comes, slips inexorably into a solitary, sickly, but not undignified middle age, and becomes something of a realist before she dies. Miriam sets out as expected: She marries a childhood friend, “not out of love but out of impatience, recognizing it as the next essential step.” Yet her pragmatism is no more successful than Beatrice’s dreamy longings; her husband soon bores and irritates her, and they part.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Simon Haggard, a man eight years Miriam’s junior, enters her life. Haggard is exceedingly handsome. He is married, with a wife in Oxford. Simon and Miriam conduct what for Brookner is a fiery lunchtime affair at his London flat. Simon and Miriam’s “extraordinary connection, for which nothing in her life had prepared her” causes Miriam to think that “she was not in love, she was in thrall.”

The ineluctable confrontation with truth comes when Simon disappears from Miriam’s life as suddenly as he appeared in it. Does the affair mark Miriam as a romantic? Brookner’s achievement is the way she resists putting Miriam into a narrow category. While Miriam is “marked for life” by this unprecedented passion, Brookner is equally concerned with how her heroine understands, reflects on and sets the event into the moral and psychological framework of her surrounding experience.

Once again, we are in familiar Brookner territory, which is charged with a dark and powerful sense of displacement, exile and loneliness; an unsentimental assessment of solitary childhoods, imperfect parents and disappointing friendships; and a visceral ominousness that develops when characters face the “possibilities receding” as age advances.

An illuminating discourse on books runs throughout “Falling Slowly.” In the books Beatrice reads, women are “unmasked, laid bare by a man who finally understood them”; Bea recognizes that this is rubbish but continues to embrace the illusion. Miriam, who is always trying to get her sister to read more discerningly, at one point gives Bea “Jane Eyre”; Bea, of course, roots for Jane’s union with the reprobate Rochester over the sensible St. John Rivers, who shares a last name with the next man who enters Miriam’s life. This is Tom Rivers, a political historian whose love Miriam rejects. Miriam is rather like Jane Eyre, “imprinted for life with the image of another man.”

Near the end of “Falling Slowly” Miriam’s ex-husband turns up and tells her, “You’ve been reading too much. That was always your trouble.” “My trouble,” she replies, speaking of Simon and Tom, “is that neither of these characters came out of a book. There were no happy endings.”

This exchange is typical of the authenticity, honesty and unblinking rigor we have come to expect from Brookner, a writer who once described herself as one of the saddest women in all of England. Out of her sadness and her intelligence Brookner has added another bleak, vivid and always compelling novel to her distinctive body of work.