‘Who are the good people of the book?’ asks Nabokov in his dissection of Madame Bovary, a question you may well ask of Anita Brookner’s Altered States. Alan’s mother, perhaps, and more convincingly his business partner’s wife, Felicity. Brookner’s polished sentences soften the force of vengeance she brings to bear on her carefully hewn characters. After the autopsy comes the mourning that is this book’s subject.
Brookner never permits easy consolations. In Altered States, goodness appears less as virtue than as a kind of absence: a refusal to harm, a capacity to endure. To read her attentively is to acknowledge the loneliness that underlies such endurance, and to see how finely literature can tune us to the small, unrecorded moral failures that accumulate in ordinary life.
I am pleased to read that Hermione Lee is currently working on a biography of Anita Brookner.