Undue Influence: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Brookner, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375707344 ISBN 13: 9780375707346

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

In Undue Influence, acclaimed novelist Anita Brookner proves once again that even in the most closely circumscribed of lives, hearts can venture into unknown-and potentially explosive-territory.

Claire Pitt is nothing if not a practical young woman, living a life in contemporary London that is to all appearances placid, orderly and consciously lacking in surprise. And yet Claire's tangled interior life gives the lie to that illusion. She is prone to vivid speculation about the lives of others, and to fantasies about her own fate that lead her into a courtship so strange that even she wonders at its power to compel her. Martin Gibson and his chronically ill wife Cynthia come to depend on Claire to an extent that is nothing short of baffling, and yet Claire becomes ever bolder in her pursuit of their acquaintance-and, ultimately, of Martin's elusive affections. The result, a potent tale of urban loneliness and the chance intersections that assuage it, constitutes one of Brookner's finest and most psychologically acute achievements.

About this title

Review:

A new Anita Brookner book is unlikely to surprise, unlikely to shock or disturb. Yet her work continues to be utterly compelling. This, her 19th novel, follows the usual pattern: a single, bookish woman, whose literary life is dominated by loneliness and the seeming impossibility of marriage, has her forlorn equilibrium disturbed by an unsuitable attraction.

Claire Pitt, at 29 one of Brookner's younger alter egos, is financially independent, clever, emancipated but empty. When Martin Gibson comes down to the basement in the second-hand bookshop where she works, Claire is beguiled. Her desire to be part of the story she tells herself about Martin's probable life leads her to provoke the quiet crisis so indicative of a Brookner dénoument.

Brookner, who is seen by some critics as the embodiment of Jamesian exactitude, as almost prissy, is really quite the opposite. An almost pathological writer, Brookner returns again and again to her notion of the inability of modern women to think of marriage as something that will rescue them--and yet who are pulled towards the ideal (an ideal they easily deconstruct) of a romantic saviour. The ubiquity of a particular, melancholic despondence saturates her work; disappointment dominates. Despite the humour, the erudition, the classical elegance of her prose, Brookner is a modern, bitter writer. Few writers have the ability to create such complete characters and then dissect their motives so clearly. Few writers have the skill to delineate the emotional complexity of the domesticated manners that mark our inability to communicate with one other. Undue Influence is another triumph of profound, psychological investigation from one of England's finest writers. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

?Brookner is at her most sly and witty in this novel. Seattle Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375707344
• ISBN 13: 9780375707346
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240