Book Mole: the work of Anita Brookner

Larry Bowlden surveys the many great works of English novelist, Anita Brookner (available at your public library). Most of her main characters are intellectual middle-class women who are isolated on account of failed love, but she eschews being called a feminist. He praises Brookner for her "total command of the language", verbose but "liquid and flowing". He describes her as sympathetic to French existentialism and unable to bring herself to believe in God - though she wants to believe in "hope for deliverance" from loneliness. This existentialist theme tends toward nihilism, at least in earlier novels, than affirmation of freedom and change. He finishes with a closer review of her latest novel, "Rules of Engagement".