Pusey and her doting daughter, Jennifer the beautiful, rail-thin Monica and the elderly “pug-faced lady,” Mme de Bonneuil. Brookner withholds the details of the misbehavior until we have come to know the off-season hotel and its inmates, thereby diverting our conventional interest in plot (why is Edith here?) as we fall into the novel’s main action: the day-to-day interactions of the almost exclusively female guests.Įdith is none too thrilled to find herself among, as she puts it, “women, women, only women”: the charming Mrs.
It’s in these sly hands that Hotel du Lac begins with Edith, a writer of romance novels, arriving at an old-fashioned hotel for a penitential exile forced upon her by her friends in the wake of perceived misbehavior. Complexity is synonymous with Brookner even in interviews, she maintains a wit so dry and subtle, you would never realize she was wielding a dart until it was lodged under your skin. The cult of Brookner fans ranges from writers like Julian Barnes to academics like Ann Fisher-Wirth, who confesses to a love/hate relationship with Brookner’s novels. We discovered more complexity than we expected from the slim 184 pages, and the more I learned about Anita Brookner, the more surprised I felt that I’d missed her for so long. I first picked up the novel because my writing group-all of us MFAers who’ve met for ten years post-program-wanted to read a book none of us knew. It isn’t just that Edith charts a different course, maritally speaking it’s that the novel’s dramatic focus is women looking critically at other women-something that occurs because Brookner has consciously placed her characters in a “gyneceum.”
Plenty to consider subversive in a context that must append the word “still” to the assertion of a single woman’s worth.Īll the attention critics give to Brookner’s unmarried heroines, though, obscures what’s truly subversive in Hotel du Lac. Thanks to the jacket copy, a generation of readers has been primed to read Anita Brookner’s 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel Hotel du Lac as “potently subversive.” Subversive how? The headline of Anne Tyler’s contemporaneous New York Times review offers one answer: “A Solitary Life is Still Worth Living.” Edith Hope, the novel’s heroine, jilts a fiancé, rejects a new proposal, and ends her affair with her married lover.
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