Falling Slowly

Our book today is Falling Slowly, a 1998 novel by the late Anita Brookner. Her death caught me by surprise, and a dispirited search of my shelves turned up only this one book, which I took down and duly re-read.

It’s the story of Miriam and Beatrice Sharpe, a pair of middle-aged sisters in London whose lives have slowly, almost imperceptibly degenerated into “a delirium of ennui.” Beatrice is a pianist on the verge of losing her berth as an accompanist, a wanly romantic figure whose syrupy view of life’s possibilities is like fresh meat in the water for a cruising shark like Brookner. Her counterpart is her wry, sardonic sister Miriam, who makes a living as a translator and is bitterly aware of the constrictions of her life:

The monotony of her current situation was of a different order, had something shameful about it, useless; without attachments she saw her desire to please as unmotivated, unsolicited. And although this might at a pinch be counted as tribute to some residual innocence, as if she were still an eager girl in quest of friends, she knew that his was not the case. Age had invested her with emotions – resentment, fear, sorrow – and she was shocked by her consistently ruminative mood, not previously encountered, regretting all the time now the breathless expectations of youth, which her continuance in the world had somehow put to shame.

(That “was of a different order, had something shameful about it, useless” has been whittled to the point where it’s practically haiku, if haiku were a martial art)

These two share a bond that’s partly involuntary and almost wholly mutually unhealthy, although true to form, our author is more concerned with carving the sharp outlines of their lives together than she is with leading her readers around by the nose to obvious conclusions. She probes their relationship with a forensic coolness that doesn’t even try very hard to mask its own malice – a malice that jabs out in all directions:

They had been witnesses to each other’s discomfiture, a condition which they could not translate for others. By their twenties, their thirties, they were popular, courted, felt themselves momentarily to be part of the effervescence around them. Those years had run their course. They had their work, they had an agreeable home, but they were a little tired of going to weddings, which to them marked the disappearance of confidantes.

Falling Slowly was Brookner’s 18^th novel, but to my eye they all read with an almost preternatural skill and precision, the amazing way Brookner seemed to appear fully-formed as an experienced novelist on the literary landscape. Long before Falling Slowly, a critic once commented that the chief joy of Brookner’s novels is the gleam in her eye as she torments the same slight plot in book after book, and that thought formed a small consolation for me in only having this one novel at hand the other day. The next time I find a copy of Hotel du Lac at the Brattle, I won’t hesitate.