Brookner blends nuance with a dark determinism
Leaving Home
By Anita Brookner
Random House, 212 pp., $23.95
Jane Austen's two inches of ivory, when worked with that extremely fine brush of hers, were room enough for six glorious novels. Anita Brookner's small patch of territory, similarly circumscribed and fastidiously worked, has so far accommodated 23, one a year since 1981, and still counting. Short and scrupulously applied to the interior worlds of solitary English women of a certain class, Brookner's books are as uniquely and reliably identifiable as a sip of Lapsang souchong. But for all their sense and sensibility, uplifting they are not.
The latest, ''Leaving Home," opens with a drift of finely nuanced memories of female friendships from another era. These scant associations belonged to the reclusive widow whose shadow falls across the book. Her only child, Emma, is its principal character who herself inhabits the chapters of ''Leaving Home" like an unthreatening ghost; marginal, scarcely corporeal. Although Emma is in her mid-20s and living in the 1980s, her compliance, faded gentility, and self-effacement seem to belong to an era or a species all but vanished from view.
Brookner's beige heroines, who saw their apotheosis in Edith Hope, the central character of ''Hotel du Lac," which won the Booker Prize in 1984, have -- if possible -- sunk into even greater unfashionableness and implausibility with the passing years. Emma, insular and passive, seems a little more listless and exasperating than some, yearning as she does for connection and spontaneity yet incapable of breaking free of the conditioning and restraint that will forever deny her these goals. Absolved of the obligation to work, she spends much of her time in refined contemplation of her own unresisted limitations.
Emma starts off determined to extract herself from her mother's London flat and its contagious image of a solitary life. Moving to even drabber quarters in Paris, she occupies herself with the study of 17th- and 18th-century garden design. This choice of subject matter -- the classical code of reticence, sobriety, and order -- is perfect for Emma, ''in search of a certain symmetry, a place of excellence that I should recognize and somehow make my own."
However, she is carrying her spinsterhood about with her like a shell on her back. In no time she manufactures in Paris an alternative version of her previous semi-detached existence, shaped by lonely study and very occasional social interaction. The slowly passing hours are enlivened by two new acquaintances: Michael, half English, half French, and entirely celibate, with whom she walks around the city or sits in gardens ''like a very old couple"; and Françoise, the book's only sexual being, an example of the life force Emma most admires and least resembles. But Françoise is even more closely confined in her role of dutiful daughter than Emma herself. Her home, a gorgeous French country house called L'Ermitage, will remain in the family only if Françoise makes an appropriate marriage. Françoise is busy sowing her wild oats and happy to take advantage of her English friend in the process.
For all its narrowness, Emma's vie parisienne comes to seem positively idyllic once her mother dies, leaving her responsible for herself. More anxious than ever now to avoid returning to the family flat, she chooses to buy a small London apartment. Restless in both cities, she shuttles back and forth between the oppressiveness of London and the supposed freedoms of Paris, disappointed in turn by Françoise, Michael, and a new acquaintance, Philip, who initially offers companionship, then the news of a hoped-for reunion with his wife. What remains is to finish her book on landscape design, to wander in deserted gardens (she prefers them that way), and surrender to her small abode.
''Leaving Home," as ironic a title as the reader is likely to encounter in any given year, is not a book to offer much in the way of reassurance. Emma, despite her terror of her mother's fate and her yearning to establish ''a real home, a home of my own," will end up alone in a smaller but equally hushed apartment, having shed none of her burdens: melancholy, rumination, the acceptance of solitude. Breaking briefly away has only brought her back to where she started, minus the optimism and small quantity of energy that had previously propelled her.
If Brookner's women often seem in retreat, none appears to have had the stuffing knocked out of her more than Emma, who resigns herself to the duty of keeping herself busy in the knowledge that the instant when ''something ardent and unrealistic" was possible is now past; that she and Françoise have ''done quite well"; that ''not everyone is born to fulfill an heroic role." Brookner's spotless craft has never been applied with a darker determinism. Eventually, the sun will set, and Emma will go gently into that good night.
Elsbeth Lindner is a writer and publisher who lives near New York City. 
