Relativity Family and Friends

By R.Z. Sheppard

Anita Brookner's smartly written novels sell briskly in England, where the author lectures on neoclassicism and the Romantic movement at London's Courtauld Institute. She is definitely not a romantic. Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac (1984 winner of Britain's Booker Prize) take dim views of grand passion. Says the heroine of Hotel du Lac, a successful author of romances, "The facts of life are much too terrible to go into my kind of fiction." The narrator of Look at Me takes this sentiment to the extreme: "It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of forgetting."

Family and Friends suggests just how difficult this art can be. The novel takes the form of a recollection, a family saga about a rich matriarch and her four temperamental children. The Dorns have left Europe (perhaps Germany in the early '30s) to establish a manufacturing business in London. They prosper, even though the elder Dorn dies prematurely and leaves Wife Sofka to turn Alfred, Frederick, Mimi and Betty into proper gentlemen and ladies. But there is only so much a mother can do. Alfred is a somber bibliophile destined to run the business and refute the opening line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"). Frederick seems to have stepped out of Turgenev, a charming, superfluous man of no apparent conviction who winds up happily married to the owner of an Italian resort hotel. Mimi, sweet and depressive, is stood up for a date as a teen, and she is well past her prime before she settles for the aging manager of the Dorn factory. Betty the bohemian demonstrates a lively spirit by running off to Paris, but she is last seen as a Hollywood pool lizard married to a film producer.

Brookner re-creates the world of the immigrant high bourgeoisie with convincing selectivity. Its style and manners are indistinguishably British, with only a hint that the Dorns, apparently Jewish, belong to a community within a community. The characters are defined largely through their social behavior. Sofka: "A shy woman, virtuous and retiring, caring only for her % children, but determined to fulfil her role as duenna, as figurehead, as matriarch. This means presentation, panache, purpose and, in their train, dignity and responsibility; awesome concepts, borne permanently in mind." Alfred: "If he translates his predicament into fiction, if he views it as a pilgrimage or a perilous enterprise or an adventure, if, in fact, he thinks of himself as Henry V or as Nicholas Nickleby, then he can soldier on, comforted by the thought that his efforts and his determination and all his good behaviour will be crowned with success, recognition, apotheosis." Frederick: he "has always worn his misdemeanours on his sleeve. It has served to make him unassailable." Mimi: "It is in order to avoid heartbreak that Mimi wills herself into accepting everything at face value." Betty: "The one thing (she) has never been able to recapture is that sense of effortless superiority that she possessed at the age of 16. Where once she had only to display herself against the dreamy passivity of her sister Mimi, she is now surrounded by women of her own type, all of them, according to Betty, 'lacking in humanity.' "

Despite these clinical assessments, the Dorns command affection and sympathy. Where some might find pretensions and cool blood, Brookner sees form and responsibilities: Sofka the young widow forfeiting romance to direct her family's fortunes, "like a general on the evening of a great campaign," Alfred shelving his cherished books for the life of an industrialist ("His character . . . will be a burden to him rather than an asset. But that is the way with good characters").

Brookner's unmistakable moral tone is never overbearing, largely because it comes wrapped in an elegant irony. But there is also her refined literary instinct, which understands fiction's obligation to define values and render discriminations and judgments. This she does in clear, astringent prose, even though the London Dorns seem oddly disconnected and unaffected by events leading up to and including World War II. Where, for example, is the Blitz, the shortages, the concern for relations left behind on the Continent? At their hotel in Bordighera, Frederick and his wife welcome soldiers under any flag who are willing to trade food for the inn's good wines.

The important battles of Family and Friends are fought over love, and in this arena Brookner is shrewd enough to know that the Geneva convention does not apply. "The rules are really crude," she said in a recent issue of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly. "The rules are: Who dares, wins. This is bad news for people who don't dare and who see others win. That's the central problem, I think. I think it's the matter nobody gets completely right." Not in life, perhaps; but this art historian who dared write novels has found the solution in literature.