Misreading Anita Brookner: Aestheticism, Intertextuality, and the Queer Nineteenth Century by Peta Mayer (review)

The final paragraph of Peta Mayer's study of Anita Brookner's fiction, Misreading Anita Brookner: Aestheticism, Intertextuality, and the Queer Nineteenth Century, reads:

Above all, through an immersion in the codings and decodings of the tricks and the layers and the irony and the playfulness of the Brookner text, I hope to communicate the consummate joy in discovering the brilliance of Brookner as woman's writer, supreme technician, and transcendent storyteller.

(p. 246)

The short answer to whether Mayer achieves her goal is a vociferous yes, but such a short response does not really do justice to this complex and multi-layered reading of six of Brookner's novels: A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1999), Falling Slowly (1998) and the Booker Prize winner, Hotel du Lac (1984). Mayer's reading draws on a substantial knowledge and understanding of nineteenth-century authors, figures, and tropes and uses these to great effect as she analyzes Brookner's employment of intertextual references, which include "the canon of Western art and literature, creating a situation where contemporary meaning is always under pressure from the past" (p. 19).

In her exploration of Brookner's writing, Mayer considers works as diverse as Brookner's own critical writing, Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature (1884) (in her discussion of Falling Slowly in chapter five), Max Nordau's Degeneration (1892), and Sigmund Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905). Mayer also traces echoes of many other authors, such as Oscar Wilde and Henry James—she argues, for example, that the figure of Michael Sandberg in A Friend from England is reconstituted from "key discourses from the nineteenth-century archives of James and Wilde" (p. 68)—and Stendhal's novel Scarlet and Black (first published in 1830 under the title Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du XIX^e siècle; the title is often translated as The Red and the Black). Mayer also explores Brookner's use of older texts—for example, the poetry of Sappho and the seventeenth-century biographical writing of John Aubrey, among others.

Utilizing her own reading of the works of Huysmans, Freud, and James (and many others) to construct a framework for her "misreading," Mayer identifies a number of key fin de siècle figures in Brookner's novels around which she builds her chapters: the "Military Man," the "Analysand," the "Queer," the "Aesthete," the "Dandy," the "Flâneur," and the "Degenerate." Mayer makes a compelling argument for their roles in Brookner's novels, identifying a form of repetition in the nineteenth-century texts and in Brookner's that often adds clarity to our reading of her novels.

As an additional layer of complexity that adds to the understanding of Brookner's writing, Mayer employs specific rhetorical devices to read the texts. For example, she discusses the use of hendiadys in Scarlet and Black in order to evaluate repetitions within that text; Mayer then applies this framework in her discussion of A Friend from England, repurposing, as she explains, "the adventure narrative as a queer misadventure" (p. 47). She focuses on the use of peripeteia when discussing Undue Influence, syllepsis in her discussion of Falling Slowly, metaleptic prolepsis when she considers A Misalliance, and the twin notions of anagnorisis and paraprosdokian (discoveries that cause "the reader to reinterpret an earlier part of the narrative") in her reading of Hotel du Lac (p. xiv). The latter, as a rhetorical device, often leads to an anti-climax, but in Misreading Anita Brookner, there is no anti-climax; in its place, we get a very satisfying conclusion to the study.

Through her varied, in-depth discussion of aestheticism, intertextuality, and the "Queer Nineteenth Century," Mayer has demonstrated her own wide-ranging scholarship of the nineteenth century, philosophical issues, rhetoric, and, not least, Brookner's fiction. Mayer has written a book that will delight Brookner...